“Your schedules were different.”
Adrian’s voice was calm, but my heart was pounding.
“Sophie told me once that she never stayed awake after midnight unless she had work. You talked to me until three in the morning.”
I swallowed.
“That doesn’t prove anything.”
“She hates coffee.”
I froze.
“You sent me a picture of your coffee every morning.”
He took another step closer.
“She hates thunderstorms. You once told me you opened your bedroom window whenever it rained because you liked listening to the sound.”
I remembered that night.
We had stayed on the phone for almost four hours.
Neither of us had wanted to hang up.
Adrian continued.
“Sophie doesn’t know how to cook. You nearly set off the fire alarm trying to make pasta.”
My face burned.
“You remember that?”
“I remember everything.”
His answer came too quickly.
I looked away.
“Then why didn’t you ask me directly?”
“I was going to.”
His expression softened.
“That was why I said her name.”
I slowly looked back at him.
Adrian repeated the unfinished sentence from three years earlier.
“Sophie… is that really your name?”
My mind went blank.
“That was what you were going to say?”
“Yes.”
“But I hung up.”
“You hung up, sent me two messages, blocked me everywhere, and disappeared before sunrise.”
“I thought—”
“I know what you thought.”
His voice was no longer angry.
That somehow made everything worse.
I had spent three years believing I was the most humiliating mistake of his life.
But Adrian had spent those same years wondering why the woman he loved had vanished.
I hugged my arms around myself.
“At the beginning, you wanted Sophie.”
“Yes.”
The direct answer hurt.
He didn’t try to soften it.
“I asked for her contact because I thought I liked her.”
“Thought?”
“I barely knew her.”
He looked toward the house, where Sophie’s laughter drifted through an open window.
“I liked an idea of her. Then someone gave me your account.”
“And you believed I was her.”
“For a while.”
“How long?”
“About two months.”
My head snapped up.
“Two months?”
He nodded.
“But we talked for more than six.”
“Exactly.”
Silence fell between us.
Adrian looked directly into my eyes.
“The moment I realized you probably weren’t Sophie, I should have stopped.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because by then, the name didn’t matter anymore.”
My chest tightened.
“I was waiting every night for you.”
His voice dropped.
“I wanted your messages. Your voice. Your ridiculous pictures of badly shaped pancakes.”
“They were hearts.”
“They looked like potatoes.”
I glared at him.
For the first time that night, Adrian smiled.
And suddenly I heard it.
That smile.
The same one I had learned to recognize through the phone without ever seeing his face.
My eyes stung.
I looked away immediately.
“You should have told me.”
“So should you.”
That stopped me.
He was right.
I had discovered the misunderstanding and made the decision for both of us.
I never gave him the chance to explain.
But he had also hidden his suspicions.
We had both been afraid of the truth.
And the truth had cost us three years.
Sophie found us twenty minutes later.
She looked from me to Adrian.
Then back to me.
Her eyes widened.
“Oh.”
I immediately knew that “oh.”
“What?”
Sophie pointed between us.
“You two know each other.”
“No.”
“Yes,” Adrian answered simultaneously.
I glared at him.
Sophie’s mouth fell open.
Then something clicked in her expression.
“Wait.”
She stared at me.
“Three years ago…”
I wanted the ground to swallow me.
She suddenly covered her mouth.
“Oh my God.”
“Sophie.”
“You were the person!”
“Sophie!”
“What person?” Adrian asked.
My sister ignored him.
“You left the country because of him?”
“I received a scholarship.”
“You accepted a scholarship in less than twelve hours!”
Adrian slowly turned toward me.
“Twelve hours?”
I wanted to disappear again.
Sophie looked horrified.
Then she pointed at herself.
“And you thought he was in love with me?”
“Yes!”
“Why?”
“Because he asked for your contact!”
Sophie blinked.
Then she started laughing.
I stared at her.
“This isn’t funny.”
“No, Summer, I’m sorry.”
She tried to stop.
Failed.
“It’s just… Adrian and I can barely survive twenty minutes alone together.”
Adrian nodded.
“That’s true.”
She looked at him.
“You’re agreeing?”
“You talk too much.”
“And you have the personality of office furniture.”
“Sophie!”
She finally became serious.
Then she reached for my hand.
“I’m sorry.”
My anger softened.
“I was the one who gave your account to Lily when she asked for mine. Our usernames were almost identical. I didn’t realize until much later.”
“You caused three years of emotional damage because you couldn’t remember your own username.”
Sophie winced.
“When you put it that way, it sounds bad.”
“It is bad.”
“I’ll pay for therapy.”
Despite myself, I laughed.
Adrian stared at me.
Not Sophie.
Me.
And for once, I didn’t have to wonder whom he was really seeing.
I didn’t suddenly become Adrian’s girlfriend.
Real life wasn’t that simple.
Three years had passed.
I had changed.
So had he.
The person I had loved existed mostly in midnight conversations and saved voice messages.
So when Adrian asked me the next morning:
“Can we start again?”
I shook my head.
His expression fell.
Then I added:
“We can start properly.”
He looked at me.
“No pretending we know everything about each other because we talked online years ago.”
“All right.”
“No calling me ‘my love.’”
He hesitated.
“For how long?”
“Adrian.”
“All right.”
“And absolutely no asking Sophie for relationship advice.”
“That condition is easy.”
From across the breakfast table, Sophie threw a napkin at him.
That was how we began again.
Not as lovers.
As Summer and Adrian.
For the first time.
Over the following months, I discovered that the real Adrian was different from the man on the phone.
He was quieter in person.
Terrible at choosing restaurants.
He read menus as though he were reviewing corporate contracts.
He hated shopping.
He loved old movies.
And whenever he became nervous, he adjusted his watch even when it was perfectly straight.
He discovered that I had changed too.
I was more independent.
Less willing to swallow questions.
And whenever something confused me, I asked.
One evening, almost six months after my return, we sat outside the café where we’d had our first real date.
Adrian suddenly said:
“I need to tell you something.”
My stomach tightened.
“What?”
“I knew where you were.”
I stared at him.
“What do you mean?”
“About eight months after you left, I found out which university you attended.”
“Then why didn’t you come?”
He was silent.
Finally, he removed his phone and showed me an old email.
It was from me.
Except I had never sent it.
Adrian,
Please stop looking for me. What happened between us was a mistake. I don’t want to see you.
Summer.
My blood ran cold.
“I never wrote this.”
“I know.”
“How?”
“Because Sophie eventually admitted your mother sent it.”
I stood so quickly my chair scraped the pavement.
“My mother?”
Adrian nodded.
“She found out I was searching for you. She believed you had left to escape me and thought she was protecting you.”
I couldn’t speak.
My mother had known enough to stop Adrian from finding me.
But not enough to ask what I wanted.
Adrian stood too.
“I was furious when I learned the truth.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Because I didn’t want our second chance to begin with another secret destroying your family.”
I stared at him.
“And now?”
“Now I think you deserve the truth more than I deserve to control when you hear it.”
That sentence mattered.
Perhaps more than any confession.
Three years earlier, both of us had made decisions based on assumptions.
This time, Adrian was giving the decision back to me.
I confronted my mother.
There were tears.
Arguments.
Apologies.
She admitted everything.
She had believed Adrian’s family was too powerful and complicated.
She feared I would abandon my studies for a man I had never met.
So she decided for me.
I didn’t forgive her immediately.
But I didn’t run away either.
That was another thing I had learned.
Leaving and healing were not always the same thing.
A year after Sophie married Daniel, our family gathered for dinner again.
This time, Adrian sat beside me.
Sophie pointed her fork at him.
“So what do I call you now?”
“Adrian,” he answered.
“Boring.”
Daniel laughed.
I shook my head.
Then Sophie grinned at me.
“Remember when you came home and called him brother-in-law?”
Everyone laughed.
I covered my face.
“I hate this family.”
Adrian leaned toward me.
“Technically, you started it.”
I looked at him.
“You were the one asking for the wrong sister’s contact.”
“And somehow I still found the right one.”
That silenced me.
Sophie immediately made an exaggerated emotional noise.
I threw a napkin at her.
Later that evening, Adrian and I walked through the garden.
The same garden where he had confronted me after my return.
He stopped beneath the old tree.
“Summer.”
“Yes?”
“I spent three years thinking our story ended because you discovered I wanted Sophie.”
I looked at him.
“And I spent three years believing exactly the same thing.”
He smiled.
“Turns out we were both idiots.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Fine. I was an idiot.”
“Better.”
He reached for my hand.
This time I took it without hesitation.
I had once believed I accidentally fell in love with a man who loved my sister.
But that wasn’t what happened.
Adrian had asked for Sophie’s contact.
Someone gave him mine.
That was the mistake.
Everything afterward—the conversations, the laughter, the nights neither of us wanted to hang up, the secrets we trusted only to each other—belonged to us.
Three years earlier, one unfinished sentence had separated us.
Three years later, we finally finished it.
Adrian squeezed my hand.
“Sophie… is that really your name?”
I smiled.
“No.”
Then I gave him the answer I should have given all those years ago.
“My name is Summer.”
His eyes softened.
“I know.”
And this time, neither of us disappeared.
