“This is what?” he asked, his voice a low rumble against her hair.

Lucas traced the line of her jaw with his thumb. “See you later, Tiffany Thompson.”

The final night, they sat in the bed of his truck, parked in his empty driveway. Boxes were stacked in the garage. The house was already a hollow version of itself.

When he looked up and caught her staring, he didn't smirk or wave. He just held her gaze for a long, silent second, then quirked one eyebrow. Tiffany’s face flamed. She grabbed Ben’s hand and dragged him toward the cotton candy stand, her heart a caged hummingbird.

The town’s annual summer carnival had set up on the football field, and the air smelled of funnel cake and diesel. Tiffany was supposed to be watching her little brother, Ben, try to win a goldfish by tossing a ping-pong ball into a row of jelly jars. Instead, she was watching Lucas Hale.

It was the most perfect, terrible thing anyone had ever said to her. Because she knew, even then, with the certainty of a sixteen-year-old heart, that summer was a bubble. And bubbles always pop.

August arrived like a slammed door. Lucas’s father got a new job, a better one, three states away. The news came not in a dramatic fight or tearful confession, but in a flat, practical sentence uttered over lukewarm gas station coffee: “We’re leaving in two weeks.”