After Leo's confession about Palm, Bella couldn't shake the feeling that the whole world had been moving around her while she stood still innocent, unprepared, too trusting for the madness of teenage hearts.
The last days of school trickled by like slow rain. Everyone was excited, loud, taking pictures on the dusty compound… but inside Bella, things had gone strangely silent.
People noticed her more now.
Maybe it was because she and Leo were always together studying, laughing at the same jokes, trading secrets they couldn't tell anyone else.
Maybe it was because she had grown quieter, softer, different.
Whatever the reason, boys suddenly started showing interest in her.
Someone would pull her aside after preps and say, "Bella, I like you."
Someone else would send her a letter tucked in her notebook.
Another would try to hold her hand on the way to the dining hall.
But Bella said no.
To every single one.
Not because she was waiting for Leo…
Not because she was in love…
But because something inside her just… didn't move.
She didn't want butterflies.
She didn't want attention.
She didn't want all the things girls her age usually craved.
She wanted peace.
She wanted honesty.
She wanted someone who felt like home.
And somehow without meaning to, without even realizing it .... Leo had become that for her.
It wasn't the romantic "I saw him and my heart melted" kind of love.
It was the gentle kind.
The hidden kind.
The kind that grows quietly between shared jokes, shared fears, shared afternoons when you think you're just friends until one day something shifts.
Bella found herself thinking about him when he wasn't around.
Wondering what he would say about something funny she saw.
Missing him when he left school early.
Feeling… something… when other girls called his name too sweetly.
It scared her.
Because she wasn't supposed to feel anything.
Because he had already hurt her once even if he didn't know it.
Because she didn't want to be the girl who fell first.
But the truth sat deep in her chest:
She cared.
More than she should.
More than she understood.
And every time Leo laughed with her ... really laughed, the kind that reached his eyes she felt something warm spread inside her, something she tried to deny.
Because after everything:
The rumors.
The drama.
The secrets she kept for him and Rose.
The loneliness that followed her like a shadow.
It was only now, at the very edge of their childhood, that Bella finally realized:
She hadn't been holding onto him because she wanted a boyfriend.
She'd been holding onto him because he made her feel understood in ways no one else did.
And that terrified her more than any heartbreak ever could.