They Said She Was Strong So They Never Had To Choose Her Chapter 09
In my junior year, I was selected for a joint program at Cambridge.
Before I left, my mother came to visit me at school for the first time, alone.
Three years had gone by. She looked older. A few silver hairs had crept in at her temples.
She didn’t try to talk me into coming home again, and she didn’t bring up Mia or the three boys.
She just followed me around the lab, listening as I explained the instruments and the research.
When we reached the honor wall, her eyes went straight to a picture of me.
I was standing in the middle of my team, holding a competition trophy.
She stared at it for a long time.
“When you were little, you always liked standing in the middle when you won something.”
I hadn’t realized she still remembered.
“Why did you stop?”
“Because I had to make room for someone else.”
Her eyes went red.
That night, she helped me pack.
She checked everything twice. Clothes, documents, all of it.
At the very end, she pulled a box out of her bag.
Inside was the exact model of telescope she had sold off when I was a kid.
Not the original one, of course. Just the same model.
“It took me a while to find. It’s been discontinued. I had to buy it from a collector.”
I touched the scratched barrel and didn’t take it.
“I have better equipment now.”
Her hand trembled slightly.
“I know.”
“I just wanted you to know that Mom remembered.”
I looked at her red-rimmed eyes, and in the end I didn’t push the box back to her.
But I didn’t hug her the way she was hoping for either.
A late-arriving apology isn’t meaningless.
It can prove that she finally understood what she did wrong.
But it can’t turn me back into the little girl who would have thrown herself into her arms over a telescope.
When I took her to the airport, we ran into Julian.
He had grown steadier. He was rolling a suitcase, apparently there to see someone off too.
My mother made an excuse and stepped away, leaving us space.
Julian didn’t try to block my path the way he used to.
“I heard you’re going abroad for two years.”
“Yeah.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks.”
After those few words, the silence set in.
He took a piece of paper out of his pocket, folded neatly.
It was the answer card from the game.
My name was still on it.
“For three years, I’ve kept wanting to change my answer.”
I didn’t reach for it.
“But then I realized. The moment you write it down, you can’t change it anymore.”
He gave a bitter smile.
“Chloe, I always thought you were the strongest one, so I didn’t need to look after you. It took you leaving for me to understand that being strong and not needing anything aren’t the same thing.”
“I’m not asking you to forgive me.”
“I just wanted to tell you in person that I know what I did wrong.”
He tore the answer card in half and dropped it in the trash can beside us.
“Take care of yourself over there.”
I nodded.
“You too.”
Before he turned to go, he suddenly asked.
“If we had all written Mia’s name that night, would you have stayed?”
I thought about it for a long time.
“Maybe.”
What had actually made me leave wasn’t a single game question.
It was finally seeing clearly that the question had just been the sum of countless choices from the past six years.
Even without that game, there would have been another graduation trip, another storage room, another moment when being pushed aside felt automatic.
Julian’s eyes went red, but he stepped back with a small smile.
“Goodbye, Chloe.”
“Goodbye.”
This time, he didn’t ask me to wait for him.
And I didn’t look back.
After two years of the joint program, I decided to stay on for my PhD.
Grayson had taken over the family business. Ethan had become an architect. Julian had moved to another city.
I would sometimes see them in mutual friends’ posts.
They never reached out to me again.
The four who had once been inseparable finally became names in each other’s contact lists, no one bothering anyone.
My mother messaged me every so often.
She stopped asking when I was coming home. Instead, she’d send pictures of the flowers blooming in the yard, or ask about the weather where I was.
When I had time, I replied.
The distance between us was still uncrossable, but we no longer pulled at each other.
Maybe that was all I could give her.
Not forgiveness, and not revenge.
Just accepting that some relationships can’t return to what they were.