I stared at Noah.

“You… remember me?”

His smile deepened.

“Emma, I remembered you before you walked through that door.”

My mind went blank.

Noah finally signed the notebook, then handed it back.

Under his signature, he had written:

To the girl who always sat by the third library window.

My fingers froze.

That was where I used to sit so I could secretly see him at the opposite table.

I looked up.

“How do you know that?”

His assistant suddenly became fascinated with his phone.

Noah leaned against the window.

“Did you really think you were the only person watching?”

My face burned.

Before I could answer, someone called him back to set.

He walked away, leaving me with seven years of questions.

That night, I opened his old social media account.

Three followers.

I had always assumed I was simply lucky enough to discover it.

But suddenly something felt wrong.

So I checked the account creation date.

Two days after graduation.

Then I noticed his first post.

A photograph of rain against a bus window.

The caption contained only four words:

Still raining in the south.

My novel was called Today It’s Raining in the South.

My hands began shaking.

The next morning, I found Noah before filming.

“Why did you accept my movie for free?”

He looked at me calmly.

“You already know.”

“Ava?”

His eyebrows lifted.

“Ava?”

“Everyone says she’s your first love.”

For several seconds he said nothing.

Then he laughed.

Actually laughed.

It was the first time I’d ever seen Noah Sterling lose his composed expression.

“Ava is my cousin’s girlfriend.”

I stared at him.

“What?”

“She asked me to introduce her to the music producer. That’s all.”

“But you said your first love had a special relationship with this film.”

“Yes.”

My heartbeat accelerated.

“Noah…”

He stepped closer.

“The film exists because of her.”

Everything around me seemed to disappear.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“But we never even spoke.”

“I know.”

“Then how could you—”

“Because every Tuesday after physical education, you bought strawberry soda even though you hated it.”

My mouth opened.

“You gave it to the security guard’s daughter on your way home.”

He continued.

“You always borrowed two books but finished only one because the second was an excuse to return to the library.”

My eyes started burning.

“And whenever it rained, you deliberately missed the first bus.”

I whispered, “How do you know?”

Noah looked at me the same way I had looked at him for three years.

“Because I missed it too.”

The truth was almost ridiculous.

For three years, I had loved Noah from across classrooms and hallways.

And Noah had been doing exactly the same thing.

After graduation, he created that private account hoping I would find it.

When an unfamiliar account became one of his first three followers, he suspected it was me.

“So you knew?”

“Not completely.”

“Then why keep posting?”

His answer was simple.

“In case it was you.”

I suddenly remembered years of photographs.

Books.

Rain.

Bus stops.

Songs.

Things I had believed were meaningless.

They hadn’t been.

“Why didn’t you ever message me?”

Noah smiled helplessly.

“Why didn’t you message me?”

I had no answer.

Two people had spent seven years waiting for the other to move first.

Then another thought hit me.

“The movie.”

Noah nodded.

“When my agent sent me the script, I recognized the story before page ten.”

I covered my face.

“Oh my God.”

“You changed my name.”

“That doesn’t make this less embarrassing.”

“You changed the school too.”

“Noah, please stop.”

He laughed again.

“And you made me much colder than I actually was.”

I lowered my hands.

“You never spoke to me!”

“Neither did you.”

Fair.

Then his expression softened.

“I accepted the film because I wanted to know one thing.”

“What?”

“Whether the ending was true.”

My novel ended with the girl watching her first love leave the country without ever confessing.

No reunion.

No miracle.

Just rain.

I swallowed.

“It was true.”

Noah nodded slowly.

“Then I don’t like the ending.”

Months later, filming finished.

At the premiere, a journalist inevitably asked about his mysterious first love again.

This time Noah looked toward me.

The cameras followed his gaze.

My heart nearly stopped.

But he didn’t expose me.

He simply smiled.

“She’ll know when she watches the ending.”

I frowned.

That wasn’t the ending I had written.

Then the film reached its final scene.

The heroine stood at the bus stop in the rain.

The boy was supposed to leave.

Instead, he turned around.

He walked back.

And for the first time, they spoke.

I stared at the screen.

That scene wasn’t in my novel.

After the credits, Noah found me backstage.

“You changed my ending.”

“I asked the director for one favor.”

“You weren’t allowed to rewrite my story.”

“No.”

He stepped closer.

“So I’ll only rewrite my part.”

Then he handed me my old notebook.

On the final page, beneath the autograph he’d given me months earlier, was another sentence:

I liked you first. I was just worse at saying it.

I laughed through tears.

Seven years earlier, I had thought my greatest regret was never telling Noah Sterling that I loved him.

I was wrong.

The real tragedy was that he had been standing on the other side of every hallway, every library table and every rainy bus stop…

waiting for exactly the same thing.

This time, neither of us waited.