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The Dinner

Two nights later, he cooked my favorite meal—chicken parmesan, candles, the good wine.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You deserve better.”

Relief flooded through me.
This was the man I knew. The man I loved.

We toasted to three years.
The wine tasted strange, metallic, but I didn’t say anything.

“How are you feeling?” he asked after a while.

“Fine,” I said, though my tongue felt heavy.
Then the room started spinning.

“What did you—?” My words slurred. I tried to stand, but the floor tilted.

He stayed seated, calm. “You should sit down. It’ll be over soon.”

“Nathan… what did you do?”

“I drugged you,” he said matter-of-factly. “I thought that was obvious.”

I fell, the world narrowing to a tunnel.
He stood, walking toward me, slow, deliberate.
“Because it’s time,” he said.

And everything went black.

The Car

I woke to the hum of highway tires.
My wrists burned. Rope.
My mouth tasted of blood and something chemical.

Nathan’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.
“You’re awake,” he said. “Good.”

“What’s happening? Where are we going?”

“Somewhere quiet. Somewhere no one will bother us.”

“Please, Nathan. Whatever’s wrong, we can fix it.”

He laughed, bitter. “Fix it? Can you bring back the dead?”

My blood went cold.

“My sister’s name was Anna,” he said evenly. “Seventeen. Volleyball player. Honor student. March fifteenth, four and a half years ago.”

Oh God.

“She was wearing jersey number eleven. Your sister hit her at fifty-two miles per hour.”

My heart stopped. “Nathan—”

“She didn’t die instantly,” he said. “Three minutes. Drowning in her own blood while your sister drove home and went to bed.”

I started sobbing. “Eva paid for what she did—”

“Probation!” he roared. “Community service! My sister’s dead forever, and yours got to pick up trash for six months.”

He pulled off the road onto gravel.
I could hear the crunch of it under the tires, the sound that still lives in my nightmares.

He came around to my door, opened it, dragged me out by the ankles.
I hit the ground hard, stones tearing my skin.

“Please,” I cried. “I wasn’t there. I didn’t—”

“No,” he said, voice flat. “But you benefited. You all did. So, I’m taking something back.”

He hauled me toward the trees, trunk open, shovel gleaming under the headlights.

The Truth

“The scar,” he said, “the one I told you my dad gave me? That was real. But it came from the car crash after I identified Anna’s body. I should’ve died too.”

“Then why not just kill Eva?” I sobbed.

“Because death’s too easy,” he hissed. “I wanted her to feel what I felt—to lose someone she loved for no reason.”

He threw me down, started pulling the rope, the plastic, the shovel. “Tomorrow, they’ll find your body. Suicide. Guilt finally got to you.”

I saw it then—a broken bottle in the gravel, three feet away.
While he turned his back, I shuffled toward it, sawing at the rope around my wrists.

“Nathan, please,” I begged. “I love you. Despite everything, I still love you.”

He smiled without warmth. “That’s the difference between us, Isabelle. Your love was real. Mine never was.”

The rope snapped.

I grabbed the bottle and slashed, catching his face.
He screamed, blood spraying.

I ran.

Barefoot, dizzy, bleeding, I tore down the road. Headlights flashed—too far.
He was behind me, crashing through branches, shouting, “You’re making this worse!”

I hit the asphalt, ran until my lungs burned.
Headlights. Finally. A car.

I waved frantically. “Help! Please!”

The driver slowed—an older woman, terrified.
She saw the blood, the panic. She unlocked one door. “Get in!”

I dove inside.
She slammed the gas.

In the rearview mirror, Nathan emerged from the trees, a bloody silhouette.
The woman gripped the wheel. “Oh my God, oh my God…”

“Call 911,” I gasped.
She handed me her phone.

“My boyfriend tried to kill me,” I screamed into it. “Nathan Olsen—he drugged me, tied me up—he’s chasing us—”

The dispatcher’s voice was calm. “Stay on the line. Units are on the way. Can you get somewhere public?”

“Walmart,” the woman—Margaret—panted. “Exit fifteen.”

She glanced in the mirror. Her face drained of color. “He’s behind us.”

Headlights closing in.
It was him.

My Boyfriend Spent Three Years Pretending to Love Me – Part 2

The night outside the windshield was a blur of streetlights and panic.
Margaret’s hands were trembling on the steering wheel. The engine screamed as she pushed it far past what it was built for.

“He’s right behind us,” she whispered.

I twisted in my seat. Headlights were gaining—closer, brighter, relentless. Even from that distance I knew the rhythm of his driving, the same calm control he’d used for everything.

My pulse felt like thunder in my throat. “The police are coming,” I said into the phone. “They said three minutes.”

“Then we just have to stay alive for three minutes,” Margaret said, voice breaking.

She turned sharply into a wider road, traffic ahead, neon signs glowing. Civilization. Hope.

But in the mirror, Nathan’s lights followed.

“Almost there,” I said, gripping the dashboard. “Almost there.”

Margaret didn’t slow. She cut through a red light, the car bouncing over the curb into a busy parking lot—a maze of lights, people, and noise.

She slammed the horn, waving at strangers, drawing attention.

And then—sirens.
Flashes of blue and red slicing through the dark.

Margaret pulled to the curb near the entrance. I threw the door open, stumbling out into the glare of headlights and police beams.

“That’s him!” I yelled. “Nathan Olsen! He’s the one!”

For a heartbeat, the whole world held still. Then officers surrounded his car, shouting orders I couldn’t hear through the ringing in my ears.

When it was over, I was standing under the floodlights, shaking so badly I couldn’t hold the water bottle someone handed me. Nathan sat in the back of a cruiser, staring at me through the glass. The look wasn’t anger anymore—it was something colder.

“You’re safe now,” an officer said.

But safety felt like a language I didn’t speak anymore.

Aftermath

The hospital was too bright. Cameras, questions, photographs of rope marks and bruises—evidence, they said.
Eva arrived at dawn, her face hollow with shock.

“He told me he admired me,” she whispered. “He told me I was brave.”

Her words collapsed into sobs. I couldn’t hold her; my hands wouldn’t stop trembling.
All I could say was, “He was never Nathan. He was revenge wearing a smile.”

For weeks afterward, I jumped every time my phone buzzed. My dreams were full of headlights and gravel. The prosecutor called Nathan’s actions “a meticulous campaign of psychological entrapment.” The court called it attempted murder.

He was sentenced again—this time for good.

Years Later

Four years passed.
New city. New job. New name again, though I still caught myself turning when someone said Isabelle in public.

Therapy helped me stitch together what was left of my trust. Some days it held. Some days it didn’t.

Then, one afternoon, I stopped at a coffee shop—different town, different everything—and heard a voice that froze the air in my lungs.

“Isabelle,” it said. Calm. Familiar.

I turned, and for a moment the world narrowed to that single word.

It wasn’t him. Just someone ordering at the counter, same cadence, different face.

My knees nearly gave out from the relief.

I went outside, breathing hard, feeling the sunlight on my face like proof.

He couldn’t hurt me anymore. But his ghost—the idea of him—still lingered in every crowd, in every “coincidence.”

That’s the thing no one tells you about surviving: the body leaves the nightmare long before the mind does.

Epilogue

Some nights I still wake up thinking I hear tires on gravel.
But then I remember who I am now—alive, unhidden, free.

I teach a class on trauma literature at the community college. When my students ask why I chose that field, I tell them:

“Because stories save us. They remind us that being broken isn’t the same as being finished.”

Sometimes I write my name on the board and look at it a moment longer than I should.
Isabelle. The name he tried to erase.

Every letter feels like a small rebellion.
Every sunrise, a quiet victory.

The End