My Online Boyfriend Mistook Me for Someone Else—I Left Chapter 11
The hospital room fell into a suffocating, dead silence, so quiet I could hear the rhythmic beep of the monitors and the ragged sound of my own breathing.
After what felt like an eternity, I finally forced the words out. “I thought about telling you.”
“Back in high school, when I first found out. But by then, you already had Cynthia wrapped around you. And by the time she left… it just felt entirely pointless.”
Hearing that, Weston walked right up to my bed, his eyes blazing with a desperate, terrifying red.
I raised my eyes, meeting his gaze with absolute, unbothered clarity. “It’s ancient history, Weston. It’s over. Why are you torturing yourself over a dead past?”
Before he could answer, the door swung open, and my studio partner rushed into the bay, completely out of breath. “Rainy! Oh my god!”
I offered her a weak nod, and she instantly swarmed the bedside, looking between me and the tall boy towering over us. “Holy crap, when I got the call last night I nearly had a stroke! Since when were you secretly hiding a boyfriend? And a literal ten-out-of-ten at that?”
I rushed to shut down the speculation. “He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Oh? Then what’s the deal?”
I paused for a fraction of a second, looking at the floorboards. “Just an old high school classmate.”
The second the words left my mouth, the heavy tension in the air snapped. By the time I looked back up, Weston Sterling had quietly vanished from the room, leaving nothing but the echo of his expensive cologne.
That exact evening, a new friend request flashed on my primary Snapchat account.
Weston Sterling.
He had memorized my burner ID from my phone screen last night. For a genius like him, tracking a sequence of characters took zero effort.
I tapped accept. Skipping the pleasantries, I fired the first shot: [How much was the hospital bill? Send me your details so I can transfer it back.]
It took a grueling hour for his reply to bubble up.
Weston: [Does it really have to be like this between us? Rainy, look at the math. We’ve known each other for almost a decade.]
Staring at those words on the glowing screen, a sharp, familiar ache flared up in my throat, threatening to bring up old tears.
Yeah. A decade.
And over those years, I had held a front-row seat watching him launch a loud, grand, legendary romance with another girl. Three years ago, he had been entirely prepared to abandon his entire life just to follow her across the globe.
I pulled up the bank app, calculated a generous estimate for the ER costs, and transferred the funds over without hesitation.
[This should cover everything. Please accept it.]
With that, I backed out of the chat and threw my phone face-down on the mattress. I sat in the darkness of my dorm room for hours, staring into the void until the building’s main power clicked off for curfew.
Only then did I pick the device back up, shifting accounts to log into the dead Snapchat profile I hadn’t touched in years.
Seeing the old cartoon avatar and the cheesy handle ‘May’, a profound wave of vertigo washed over me. It felt like looking at a stranger’s life.
I clicked open Weston’s profile. It was the exact same avatar from high school; he hadn’t changed it once.
My eyes drifted down to our chat history. He had been messaging this dead account every single day. The system limits only allowed me to see the logs from the past week — the years of messages prior were lost to the ether.
Weston: [Good morning.]
Weston: [Ran into an old high school buddy today. He asked if I ever tracked you down. I told him no. I used to be incredibly arrogant, Rainy. I thought I had the universe figured out. But this… this was the biggest failure of my life. I picked the wrong girl. You know that, don’t you?]
Weston: [Are you eating well?]
I scrolled through every single line, my face perfectly numb. Once the last bubble cleared the screen, I tapped the settings icon and hit ‘Permanently Delete Account’.
Sometimes, in the quiet hours of the night, the stray thought would crawl up: What if he hadn’t picked the wrong girl that morning? Where would we be standing today?
But the universe doesn’t deal in ‘what-ifs’. The script was already written, and there were no rewrites.