Enemies to lovers? No. Worse. They were childhood best friends—the kind who knew each other’s secrets before they knew how to keep them. She loved him long before she understood what love was, long before she had words for the ache of wanting someone to stay beside you forever. Then he murdered her sister. Or so she believed. Grief hollowed her out. Rage kept her standing. And when she was finally given the impossible chance to go back in time, she used it with one purpose: stop him before he could ruin everything. Only to uncover the truth. He was innocent. He had taken the blame for someone else’s crime, swallowed the accusation whole because the real culprit had been too dangerous, too powerful, too untouchable to expose. When she returns to the present, the world feels wrong in her hands. Her chest is tight, her throat raw, and when she finally finds him again, she can barely breathe enough to speak.

"Why?" she whispers, tears burning at the corners of her eyes. "Why would you let me hate you all these years? Why would you let me believe you were capable of something like that?"

He looks at her for a long moment, and when he smiles, it is not with triumph or relief, but with a sadness so deep it seems to have lived in him for years. It is the kind of smile that carries every unspoken apology, every sleepless night, every moment he chose her pain over his own truth.

"Because if you hated me," he says softly, "then you wouldn't spend the rest of your life blaming yourself. You wouldn't keep turning grief into a punishment. I could live with your hatred if it meant you could keep going. I'd rather lose you forever than watch you destroy yourself trying to carry a guilt that was never yours."

And somehow, that hurt more than believing he had killed her sister.