Chapter 7 - The Boyfriend
If someone had asked June about her boyfriend, she would have smiled before answering.
Not because she was pretending to be happy.
Because she genuinely was.
Or at least, she had been for a very long time.
The relationship had started the way many relationships started when people were young. Gradually. Naturally. Without grand declarations or dramatic certainty. One day they were talking more than usual. Then they were spending more time together. Then, somewhere along the way, neither of them could remember what life had looked like before the other person was there.
For a while, that felt enough.
More than enough.
At seventeen, June wasn't searching for something extraordinary. She wasn't waiting for destiny. She wasn't hoping to be rescued by a mysterious stranger who would suddenly transform her understanding of love.
She simply wanted someone she enjoyed being with.
Someone kind.
Someone funny.
Someone who cared.
And her boyfriend cared.
That was never the issue.
If anything, he cared so naturally that June eventually stopped noticing it.
The way people stopped noticing sunlight after living somewhere long enough.
The way people stopped noticing their favorite song after hearing it too many times.
Not because those things mattered less.
Because they became part of the background.
Part of life.
Part of normal.
The relationship itself wasn't perfect, but June had never expected perfection. People argued. People became busy. People misunderstood each other. That was normal.
In fact, if she had been forced to describe the relationship honestly, she probably would have called it comfortable.
Comfortable was a strange word.
People spoke about comfort as though it were automatically a good thing.
Most of the time it was.
Other times, comfort quietly became assumption.
Assumption became habit.
And habit became something people stopped paying attention to.
Neither of them noticed the change while it was happening.
Why would they?
Nothing dramatic occurred.
No betrayal.
No lies.
No explosive arguments.
Just two people growing older while trying to figure out who they were becoming.
At seventeen, that already felt complicated enough.
Elliot had nothing to do with any of this.
That was perhaps the most important thing to understand.
If someone had suggested otherwise, June would have laughed.
Not politely.
Genuinely.
The idea would have seemed absurd.
Elliot was an online friend.
A study partner.
A person who appeared around eight o'clock most evenings and somehow remained patient through her endless questions.
Nothing more.
June never hid him from anyone because there was nothing to hide.
Sometimes she mentioned him.
Sometimes she didn't.
The same way she might mention a classmate, a friend, or someone she happened to talk to regularly.
There was no secret.
No tension.
No confusion.
At least not from her side.
If June thought about Elliot at all, she thought about him the way people thought about reliable things.
A favorite café.
A familiar route home.
A friend who always answered messages eventually.
His presence felt reassuring.
That was all.
Or so she believed.
Looking back, June would sometimes wonder whether that was why she never questioned his place in her life.
She questioned everything else.
Future plans.
Career choices.
Relationships.
Dreams.
Goals.
Herself.
Constantly.
But never Elliot.
Elliot was easy.
Predictable in the best possible way.
He showed up.
He listened.
He remembered things.
He encouraged her when she started another ridiculous project she would probably become obsessed with for two weeks before moving on to something else.
And then life continued.
Nothing about it felt significant.
Not then.
Certainly not enough to deserve careful examination.
The truth was that June never spent much time wondering why Elliot was still around.
People stayed.
People left.
That was how life worked.
At seventeen, she assumed Elliot belonged in the first category.
A good friend.
A reliable friend.
An unusually patient friend.
But still just a friend.
And because she believed that so completely, she never stopped to ask herself a question that might have changed everything.
Why.
Why did he stay?
Why did he always show up?
Why did he remember things most people forgot?
Why did he care about projects that had nothing to do with him?
Why was he willing to spend so much time helping someone he had never even met?
The questions never occurred to her.
Not because she was selfish.
Because she trusted him.
Trust, after all, has a way of making unusual things feel ordinary.
And once something feels ordinary, people stop looking at it too closely.
At seventeen, June considered that a blessing.
Years later, she would realize it had also been a blind spot.
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