He Drugged Me For Her Future Chapter 01
With thirty days left until the SATs, I was up studying past midnight again when my phone pushed a post to my feed.
[Kingston tuition or a million dollars. Which one would you pick?]
The top comment stopped me cold.
[Why not both? I just turned eighteen, and I’ve got both. And this is coming from someone who started with a deadbeat dad and a mom who ran out on us.]
When people pressed her for details, she answered: [The Kingston spot is for early admission. As for the million dollars, I didn’t even ask; it was just handed to me.]
A few minutes later, she added: [To be honest, that early admission spot was supposed to go to the class beauty. But on interview day, she never showed up. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.]
My chest tightened.
I had missed my own early admission interview last week. The spot I had been counting on had slipped right through my fingers.
I kept scrolling. Then she wrote: [Nobody knows me here anyway, so I’ll just say it. The class beauty missed her interview because her childhood best friend slipped her a sleeping pill. All so I could get in.]
[And the million dollars? Same guy gave it to me. Not in cash. It’s a family heirloom diamond ring worth a million. That clueless class beauty has no idea she is walking around with a ten-dollar fake on her finger.]
[They have been promised to each other since they were kids. So what? Still could not compete with me.]
My fingers went cold.
Slowly, my eyes traveled from the phone screen to the ring on my left hand.
Was she talking about me, the class beauty?
***
I thought back to the night before my interview. The warm milk Tyler Harrison had handed me himself.
My head started spinning.
I grabbed my black coffee from the Keurig and took a long sip.
Once my heartbeat steadied, I told myself it could not be true.
There was no way Tyler, the person who drugged his own childhood sweetheart, could be that person.
From the time we could barely talk through the chaos of our teenage years, Tyler had climbed trees with me, flown kites, and watched the stars.
He remembered everything I liked. He tracked my period on a health app.
For eighteen years, our lives had been intertwined.
On my eighteenth birthday, in front of our entire school assembly, he slid his family’s heirloom ring onto my finger and promised, “Emma, I am going to spoil you forever.”
The love in his eyes was as bright and fierce as it had always been.
How could that be fake?
Just a coincidence.
I exhaled slowly and kept reading.
Within minutes, people had piled on her in the comments. So she started a new thread.
[What is so terrible about what I did? She was the idiot who drank the milk herself.]
The moment I read that line, something inside me started crumbling.
My fingers kept scrolling in disbelief.
Eighteen years of love ran so deep that even with the evidence right in front of me, part of me was still denying it.
Then she posted one last time.
[Why are you calling me the other woman? The one who is not loved is the real other woman, simple as that.]
She didn’t say anything else. Just added a photo of two hands intertwined, fingers laced together.
My eyes stung with tears.
The man’s hand in the photo. Every finger had visible scars at the base.
Exactly the same as Tyler’s hands. The ones he had damaged when a car ran over them at age ten saving me.
The other hand wore a diamond ring, with delicate, artfully painted nails.
I recognized that hand. It belonged to Madison Cole. The same Madison who had gotten early admission with Tyler last week.
My phone started ringing, pulling me out of the suffocating silence.
It was Tyler.
[Bet you lost track of time studying again, didn’t you, Emma? It is late. Go to sleep.]
That familiar message. Every single night at exactly 2:00 a.m.
He had caught me pulling all-nighters too many times. So he made a rule, “I will stay up with you, but at 2:00, you sleep.”
A dull ache pulsed through my fingertips.
I looked down and realized I had been unconsciously picking at the ring on my left hand.
A fake is a fake. After just a few picks, the color was already rubbing off.
I let the tears roll down my face and snapped a picture of the discolored ring. I sent it to Tyler.
[Tyler, it is losing its color. Is this really your family’s heirloom diamond ring?]
