Unbeknown to Beth — who spent those days walking the city with a cautious relief in her heart — she had, yet again, underestimated Leon Troy.
For all his talk of longing and messages sent at dawn, Leon's world was rarely so straightforward.
Yes, he had come to Oxford. Yes, he had sent that message to Beth, but in typical Leon fashion, that wasn't what had pulled him onto the jet. No: Leon was in Oxford to tour The Manor House, Bampton, a sprawling estate in Oxfordshire that had caught his restless eye through some late-night call with his stepmother's property consultant. It was "beautifully decaying," with "potential for exquisite restoration," which to Leon translated as: perfect setting for another reinvention of myself.
But, of course, he had not come alone.
No version of Leon Troy traveled alone.
His usual entourage had appeared around him like shadows: Gabe, Rene, Kevin, and Luke—the core four, the boys who had somehow survived years of fame, scandal, and nightclub mornings with Leon at their center. They were used to the chaos. They thrived in it.
Beth? Her message hadn't troubled Leon at all. In fact, he hadn't even thought it through deeply. He had read it in the car on the way to Heathrow and had smirked slightly—not cruelly, but with the kind of maddening detachment that came naturally to him. She'll come around, he thought vaguely, before promptly forgetting the matter in favor of property brochures.
In the first three days in Oxford, Leon barely set foot near the city's hallowed academic corners.
Instead:
He and the bros had crashed three nightclubs in two nights.
They'd turned up at a private after-hours show for an up-and-coming DJ Leon vaguely claimed to know from Berlin.
They'd drunk an obscene amount of vintage champagne Gabe had "sourced" via some mysterious dealer.
They'd each been seen—very visibly—on the arms of assorted local models and university girls, none of whom, Leon noticed, came close to replacing the kind of real gravity Beth had once offered him.
Not that he'd admit it.
At The Manor House, he had toured the rooms with half-hearted interest, running his fingers over ancient bookshelves, tilting his head at arched ceilings, occasionally snapping photos for Aglaya and Clare with captions like "Gothic enough for a tragedy?"
He'd said almost nothing about Beth. Not even to Gabe or Rene.
But that didn't mean he wasn't thinking about her.
He was Leon Troy. He always had a plan. It was just that, in true Leon fashion, she wasn't first on the list—yet.
For now, he'd let the world think he was partying.
He'd let Beth think he had gone.
And in a few days—then he would decide what to do about the one girl in Oxford who had told him no.
That Friday night, Beth let herself go out.
It had been a long week — readings, papers, the usual swirl of Oxford life — and her friends had insisted. "You need to have fun again," they said. And part of her believed them.
So she dressed simply, in a soft sweater and jeans, her hair loose, her smile natural. No performance. Just Beth.
The bar was warm, crowded, and humming with music. Lights flickered off the bottles behind the counter, laughter rose in bursts, and her friends tugged her toward the dance floor.
But first — drinks.
As Beth moved through the crowd toward the bar, her eyes flicked casually around the room — a habit she hadn't fully shaken. And then she noticed a table in the corner.
Seven people, clustered around in the low light. Stylish, but not overdressed. Comfortable in a way that suggested money and fame without needing to shout it.
She squinted.
There was something… familiar about a few of them.
The tall one with the close-cropped hair — hadn't she seen him in some candid online, standing beside a famous actor? The one with the gold chain and the easy grin — that face looked like it belonged in a magazine spread. Another with sharp cheekbones and a battered leather jacket leaned back like he owned the world.
Beth frowned, trying to place them. A flicker of memory—something from the paparazzi photos, the GQ spreads, the blurry edges of Leon's life.
But there was no Leon.
And for that, Beth exhaled.
Good, she thought.
Very good.
Twenty minutes later, just as Beth was finally beginning to lose herself in the music, in the easy rhythm of her friends around her, the door of the bar opened with that peculiar hush that sometimes falls when someone truly magnetic enters a room.
She glanced instinctively toward it — and her breath caught.
A figure moved through the doorway with an almost surreal grace.
Blonde hair, gleaming faintly beneath the low lights.
Lithe frame, all angles and effortless fluidity.
Short-sleeved white shirt with thin black stripes, perfectly fitted across his lean shoulders.
Black trousers, tailored to within an inch of perfection.
He paused by the fish tank, one hand lightly resting on the glass, head tilted. His eyes traced the slow drift of the fish inside — but not with idle curiosity. No — it was a gaze with intent, as if he were sizing them up, considering whether they were meant to entertain, to decorate, or perhaps even to be consumed.
Beth's heart stopped mid-beat.
The world seemed to blur.
It was Leon.
Leon Troy.
He straightened after a moment, apparently deciding the fish were not worthy of his attention, and turned — moving toward the table where the seven figures she had half-recognized sat waiting for him.
And in that instant, Beth understood something she hadn't wanted to before:
This was why no one could let him go.
Not truly. Not completely.
Because he was so stunning he didn't seem human.
No — standing there in that bar, he looked as though he'd stepped out of a different dimension entirely.
Her pulse thundered in her ears.
She wanted to look away.
She couldn't.
And in the deep part of her that she thought had healed, a tiny, sharp voice whispered:
This is why you loved him.
And why you have to forget him again.
It was absurd.
Beth sat stiffly at her table, her drink untouched, trying to focus on her friends' laughter and the hum of the bar. But her gaze kept being pulled — like a tide she couldn't fight — back to him.
Leon sat now with his entourage, draped across the corner booth like a king surrounded by his court. His posture was deceptively languid, head tilted, fingers idly tracing the rim of his glass.
And then — the first call.
He answered with a low, lazy murmur, eyes half-lidded, voice so soft that even those beside him had to lean in to catch the words.
Beth tried to look away.
Then the second call came.
Another model — Beth caught the name Isabel in a faint drawl.
The third: Mara.
Fourth: Vivienne.
Fifth — she didn't catch the name, but the tone was unmistakable.
Five different models in an hour. Each call answered in the same detached, almost bored manner, as if it was not a life he chose but one he endured. He didn't look eager, nor pleased. If anything, he looked faintly weary — eyes heavy, as though even this carousel of attention had long since lost its flavor.
But being Leon, he answered them all.
Of course he did.
Beth clenched her glass tighter, her knuckles white.
When they were dating — no, it hadn't been this absurd. Or maybe it had, and love had shielded her from it, had made her blind to the sheer performance of the man. Now, from a distance, with a heart that had fought hard for its own freedom, she saw it clearly:
It wasn't intimacy.
It wasn't romance.
It was maintenance.
Leon Troy, endlessly tending to the persona that the world had built around him — the beautiful tragic boy who answered every call, who kept every admirer dangling, who played the part so long he probably didn't know where the part ended and he began.
Beth swallowed hard.
This isn't you anymore, she reminded herself fiercely. You've left this.
And yet — her pulse still thrummed, her chest still ached.
Because it was one thing to renounce a ghost.
It was another to sit in the same room and watch it breathe.
Beth's gaze flickered back again—damn her curiosity, damn the ache that wouldn't quite settle.
She noticed it now, something she hadn't fully seen before:
Leon was drinking. A lot.
It wasn't a messy kind of drinking—there was no slurring, no stumbling. No, Leon Troy drank the way he did everything else: beautifully, dangerously, with the kind of languid detachment that made it seem like the glass reached his mouth of its own accord.
She counted without meaning to.
First a dark whiskey, neat.
Then champagne—someone had ordered a bottle, and Leon had accepted a glass with that faint, ironic half-smile.
Then another whiskey.
Then a vodka shot passed discreetly across the table from Rene.
And back again to whiskey.
His eyes were heavier now, his movements slower, more liquid than languid. He wasn't laughing with the others, not really. The smiles he gave Gabe or Luke or the girl who now sat too close on his left were more reflex than real.
And Beth realized something bitter, something that chilled her despite the press of the crowd:
He had probably always drunk like this.
He had just never taken her to a bar.
When they had been together, it had been secret picnics, quiet cafés, empty parks at twilight. He had shown her the tender parts, the curated pieces of Leon—the boy beneath the fame, or so she had thought.
But this?
This was what the rest of the world got.
This was the part he never let her see.
And now, sitting apart from it, Beth finally understood: it wasn't because he was protecting her.
It was because he didn't want her to witness this version of himself—the one lost in drink and endless calls, trapped in a cycle of attention he claimed to despise but never stepped away from.
Her stomach twisted. The room seemed too warm.
As Beth sat at her table, feigning conversation with her friends but ears involuntarily tuned to the low hum of Leon's corner, she caught another piece of truth she hadn't expected.
It slipped out casually, amid the laughter and half-shouted remarks over the music — Gabe, with his usual offhanded swagger:
"You think the professors'll still pretend not to care when he's back in New Haven next week?"
"He's back already," Rene chimed in, swirling his glass lazily. "He just flew out here for this house thing. Term's about to start again."
"MFA life," Luke added with a crooked grin. "Only Troy would do Yale and still end up clubbing half of Europe between classes."
Beth blinked, trying not to show the sharp jolt that shot through her.
Yale.
Leon had applied to Yale. Not only that — he'd been studying there since seventeen. A year younger than the usual student. Graduated with a degree at twenty-one. And was now back there for an MFA.
Linda had said he hadn't applied to university. Everyone had assumed the myth — that Leon Troy had skipped academia for fame, drifting from runways to film sets to magazine covers. But this—
He had gone to Yale. Quietly. Kept it out of the headlines, somehow.
And now he was still there.
Beth's mind spun.
He had never told her. Not once. Through all those long walks in Reine, those hours where she thought they had been sharing truths, he had said nothing about it. Not about that part of himself — the one that clearly still craved some kind of grounding outside the flashing cameras.
He had kept her outside that world, too. Just like he had kept her from the bars, from the calls, from the entourage.
And yet again, here was another version of Leon Troy — one she'd never seen. One he had never trusted her with.
Beth sat straighter. Her fingers wrapped tighter around her glass. The ache she'd felt seeing him wasn't gone — but it was being reshaped, honed.
She had loved a ghost.
Not a boy. Not a man. A ghost carefully pieced together from fragments Leon had chosen to show her.
And now, across the room, that ghost was drinking and laughing in the body of someone she no longer recognized.
She forced herself to turn back to her friends.