Do Not Fall For The Baseball Captains novel Chapter 105

Victoria’s POV

By the time evening arrived, the house had grown quiet again.

Adele had gone to the kitchen to study for her own exams, leaving me with my textbooks spread out across the mattress.

With a massive amount of effort, I had managed to pull myself together enough to read.

The upcoming papers weren’t the toughest on my schedule, a small mercy for which I was profoundly grateful.

If I had been forced to sit through the complex calculations of fluid mechanics in this current state of mind, I would have failed entirely.

There was no way I could have thought straight enough to balance equations while my brain was short-circuiting. /

But the mere thought of fluid mechanics brought a fresh sting to my eyes.

I stared blankly at the page of my notebook, remembering how he had sat beside me in Caleb’s hospital room, casually quizzing me while tapping a pen against his knee.

I remembered the smooth, confident tone of his voice as he corrected my formulas, guiding me through the layout of the problems all the way up until that final Sunday before the papers.

Every single piece of knowledge I had used to write that first exam was tied to his face, his voice, his presence.

A fresh tear slipped down my cheek, hitting the paper with a soft tap and smudging the ink of my handwritten notes. It ached so intensely it made me gasp.

I missed him. I missed him so much it hurt.

But how was I supposed to just overlook what he had done? How could I trust a man who built an entire relationship on a scaffolding of lies?

In the dark hours of the night, the grief twisted into something uglier: self-blame.

I found myself staring at the wall, a bitter resentment bubbling up in my chest-not just toward Elijah, but toward Caleb.

A dark, irrational part of my mind whispered that if I hadn’t been so pathetic, if I hadn’t fallen for my childhood best friend like some lovesick idiot, none of this would have happened.

If I hadn’t carried that ache around campus like a badge of honor, no one would have looked at me and seen a girl sick with unrequited love. Elijah wouldn’t have seen a target.

He wouldn’t have had the opportunity to engineer a lie specifically designed to dismantle my defenses and get close to me.

But as soon as the thought formed, the unfairness of it turned my stomach.

Caleb was innocent in this. He had never asked me to fall for him, and he certainly hadn’t asked to be used as a pawn in Elijah’s game. It wasn’t his fault.

And despite the sheer misery of the betrayal, if I was being completely honest with myself in the dark… a small, foolish part of my heart appreciated the fact that I had gotten to know Elijah Carter.

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