Sweet Romance13 min read
The Sea, the Net, and the Promise I Broke
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The sea pulled at me with a polite cruelty, like a hand that knew my name and ignored it.
"Ellis, help me!" I shouted, salt in my throat, the words cutting like cold glass.
"El—" The water stole the rest of what I meant to say. My left ankle stung; something was wrapped around it under the surface, tugging me deeper every second.
I knew how to swim. I swam before I could walk. But the ocean had ways of turning skills into stories you told other people later. My legs were not listening. "Ellis, my leg—" I tried again.
Someone else answered instead. "Ellis! Help me!" A new voice—clear, small, terrified—rose from the same mouth that had only ever been an outline in my life lately: Daniela.
I saw him then. Ellis Baumann, stroking the water with long, sure strokes, closing distance toward Daniela as if the world had narrowed to a single line between them.
"No," my brain said, but my body refused to hear. "No—" The waves closed over my face.
I watched from the bottom, thinking in fragments: the boy who once took the blame for my broken vase, the boy who wrapped my finger after a stupid kitchen cut and teased me while he did it, the boy who called me by my full name when he was annoyed. He was the reason I had trusted the shore. He was the reason I had believed small kindnesses were always mine to keep.
Ellis carried Daniela to the sand. He almost never hesitated anymore when it came to choices that involved her.
When I opened my eyes in the hospital, light and quiet were sharp like paper. My mother was there. Her hands smelled of antiseptic and the office—work—she had been pulled back to. She apologized in small peals, like a machine trying to cry.
"Who saved me?" I asked eventually.
"Ellis carried you out," she said. "But he said he saw you swept farther out and then he found you."
I didn't want to be grateful. I didn't want the confusion in my chest. I wanted answers: why his back had turned when I needed him; why the boy who had been my fortress had chosen differently that day. I wanted him to remember every joke, every time he stood between me and trouble.
He came to the hospital anyway. He hovered in the doorway like a sleepwalker, his voice rough.
"You can swim, can't you?" he asked.
"You knew I could," I said quietly, eyes fixed on the ceiling. "You saw me in the water."
He said, "I didn't know her couldn't—" and stopped, hands in pockets.
"Did you pick her over me?" The question was ordinary-sounding but heavy as iron.
He knelt at my bed and said, "I thought she couldn't swim. I thought she was closer to drowning."
"Did you think she mattered more?"
He rubbed his thumb along the edge of the hospital tray like it would smooth everything out. "I don't know."
I could have forgiven a slip, a misread, a panic. But the years before had taught me to read patterns. He had been choosing differently for months. I had been kept at arm's length by his tone, by the way he smiled sometimes for the new friend and not for me.
"Then don't come back," I told him. "Don't call me. Don't—"
"You're shutting me out," he said with a choked laugh. "We know each other. Ten years. You can't just—"
"I can," I said. "I will."
He left, and the corridor swallowed his footsteps.
Days later, when my head stopped spinning and I could walk with a cane and a paper brace, the world continued its small motions. People still sat beside each other in lecture halls. Professors still assigned essays. Ellis and Daniela stood close in every place where I had once expected to find him—cafeteria lines, study groups, that stupid bridge where we'd carved initials as kids.
"Do you miss him?" Jayla asked one evening while we packed our backpacks.
"He left," I said. "And he made a choice."
"Are you sure you don't want him back?"
I shook my head. "No. You don't get to make that choice for me."
From then on I started to notice things I had skimmed over before. The way Ellis would roll his eyes at my jokes—used to happen, but now it felt sharp. The way he suddenly deferred to Daniela at group meetings. The small, tactical kindnesses he reserved for her: a front-row seat, a shared umbrella, a bowl of clear soup when she couldn't eat spicy.
One afternoon at the student exchange meeting—an early start where fewer than a hundred students showed—I watched Daniela stand and speak. Her voice was controlled and bright. Then a cup clattered somewhere, and she stopped mid-sentence. "Eating while someone is speaking—is that respectful?" she demanded, eyes hunting the room until they landed on my roommate, who had only been nervously eating a piece of bread.
Jayla looked up, cheeks flushing. "I—I'm sorry. I had low blood sugar," she tried to explain.
Daniela's smile didn't soften. "Then eat beforehand. A talk deserves respect."
I stood up. "She's not being rude on purpose. She has low blood sugar."
Ellis looked at me with an expression I couldn't name. "This is about respect, Kiana," he said. "You know the world doesn't adjust because you don't want to get up early."
"Is this about respect," I repeated, "or about smearing someone on a stage to look better in front of others?"
Daniela's small, perfect eyes found mine. "Do you not understand decorum?"
"No," Jayla cried, embarrassed and small.
The room shifted and settled like a tide. Some students nodded at Daniela, some looked uncomfortable. Ellis, who had sat at my side for most life, stood up and told me, with that same flatness, "You need to learn a little more restraint."
I left angry and hollow. He said, "You're being vulgar," and I realized then that he had placed Daniela on a scale I no longer fit.
The cold war between us survived on small slights. He gave her a seat on the bus. He blocked my texts. I blocked his number. We coexisted only in mutual acquaintances and the way his shadow sometimes bent across my hallway.
Then the rumor started. Whispers in the library, pauses in the cafeteria. "Did you hear Daniela got first in that class?" "I heard she took a scholarship no one else could get." I shrugged it off until a late night in the lab when two classmates left files open and a name shimmered across my laptop: Daniela's perfect score.
I dug.
The discovery didn't come in a dramatic rain of evidence. It arrived in quiet documents: a copied lab report, a file with metadata that didn't belong to the time she claimed, an email chain with a professor that hinted at favors and soft words. The scholarship that had seemed like a triumph smelled wrong now.
"Are you sure?" Jayla asked when I showed her the files.
"I'm sure," I said. "Someone scrubbed out timestamps. Someone edited history."
"Who?" she breathed.
"It looks like Daniela. And a professor—" I swallowed. "And Ellis's name is in the donation paperwork."
Jayla's mouth made a small O. "No way."
I could have taken it to a small-minded revenge: a text to humiliate her by exposure. But the old tide in me wanted a sequence, a public unmasking that would force witnesses to watch them unravel.
I waited.
I gathered evidence like someone collecting shells in a pocket: reports with matching sentences, screenshots of messages, the professor's altered grading spreadsheet, bank transfer confirmations that answered a question I didn't even know I had.
On a grey afternoon, I walked into the department office. The door was half-closed. I knocked.
"Who is it?" said the head of department, Professor Boyd Church, without looking up from a stack of files.
"It matters that you look up," I said. "I have something you should see."
For the next hour there were voices, then silence, then the low thump of feet in the corridor. Daniela arrived in a neat coat, shoes tapping determination. Ellis came after her, hands in his pockets, face schooled.
"You brought me here for what, Kiana?" Dani—her public name now—asked, guarded.
"I brought the truth," I said simply.
On the table I placed the proof. I set it like a white flag. The professor read. His face, which usually held amusement, tightened to a color I'd never seen on him.
"Where did you get these?" he asked.
"From where the evidence lives," I said. "From open folders, from file histories, from the people who thought no one would look."
Daniela laughed at first. "This is ridiculous. You think I'm stupid enough to do—"
"Do you deny the email threads?" I asked.
She faltered. "I—"
Ellis's face went white. "It wasn't like that," he blurted. "I arranged a donor partnership. I thought—"
"You thought what?" I asked. "That money would buy a clean scholarship? That someone else could engineer the grades and it would never come back around?"
Daniela's composure cracked. "You don't get it," she said, voice high. "I needed it. I had people depending on me."
"Like your grandmother?" I said.
She looked as if I'd slapped her. "That's private."
"Then why drag others into your private lies?" I snapped.
They tried. Ellis insisted on a mixture of excuses: panic, a desire to help, pressure from his father, a belief that the teacher was corrupt already. Daniela cried about needing money and being trapped. The professor admitted to turning a blind eye because of the donation and because he liked things to run smoothly.
Then I did the thing I had been building up to. I asked for a meeting with the student body.
"We'll let the school decide," I told Professor Church.
He nodded. An hour later the department lounge thrummed with the curiosity of thirty students, two administrators, and the professor who taught the class Daniela had cheated in. Phones rested on tables; eyes were bright with that particular hunger that comes when spectators sense a story.
"Why are we here?" someone asked.
I slid the printed pages across the table like an evidence tray. "Because you deserve to see what was done under your noses."
Daniela's microphone voice tried to climb back onto control. "This is harassment."
"It is exposure," I said.
For five minutes the room was merely shocked. Then, when the small truths become undeniable, people began to speak. "So you lied," a girl said, pointing. "So you got someone to fake your grades." Cameras raised. The university's official recorder was on the table. Someone started filming on their phone.
"Daniela, did you ask Professor Church to inflate your grades in exchange for donations?" I asked.
She stared at me. "No. No, I—" Her composure shredded like paper in water. "I negotiated, yes. I thought… I thought it would be okay if I was the one to receive the scholarship. I didn't think anyone would question it."
Ellis's hands curled into fists. "I thought I was helping the department and helping her at the same time."
"Helping?" A laugh broke out from someone. "You helped cheat."
Daniela's eyes shifted. Then she made the first human mistake of a guilty person: she smiled as if she could sell it. "You don't understand what it meant," she said.
"Explain it," I said. "Explain while everyone listens."
Her voice thinned. "I wanted him to notice me. I wanted him to see me as someone with options. I didn't want—"
"You wanted Leonardo Andersson?" someone said in disbelief. "You wanted who?"
At that name, silence splintered. Leonardo Andersson—my rescuer, the steady senior who had pulled me onto the sand that day and who had been wrongfully anonymous until then—had been an unwitting benchmark in her plans. Daniela's revealed motive sounded like a fever dream: she thought if she shone, she could make Ellis see her differently. She had used money, grades, and the people's trust to climb.
Ellis's posture collapsed. His face did something that made my past with him feel like a mirage: he was small. "I didn't know about the extent," he said. "I thought it was a scholarship sorted by a donor. I signed a paper. I thought—"
"You signed your name under a lie," I said. "You used your family's influence to make it easier for her to cheat."
The crowd's mood shifted into judgment. Phones clicked. "You arranged it," someone shouted. "You gave money to buy a false success." A professor present murmur-shushed, but strangers took photos anyway.
The punishment was not what I imagined as revenge; it was formal, and so it stung with officialness. The dean called for a hearing. The school convened a public meeting with students, faculty, and donors present. They announced the suspension of the professor and a requirement for a public apology and restitution for Daniela. They also announced that Ellis's family's donation would be rescinded and that Ellis would be sent abroad for study—an administrative punishment that would change the trajectory of his life.
But it was the public unraveling I had wanted.
They brought Daniela to the front of the auditorium. The room smelled of old upholstery and the electric charge of a crowd that knows someone's mask will come off.
"Daniela Dunlap," the dean said, "we will allow you to speak."
She stepped forward with a face that had been taught how to look in a hundred staged photos: composed and practiced. For the first thirty seconds she gave the practiced line—apology, regret, "I didn't know better"—then it broke.
"You don't know what it's like to have people looking at you like you are not enough," she snapped. "You don't know what it's like to have to fight for everything—"
"Everyone in this room struggled," someone yelled back. "But you lied and you stole that struggle from others."
She looked at that person and something shifted. The practiced sorrow hardened to anger. "You think I did it alone?" she hissed. "Ellis helped. He promised the donation. The professor took it."
It was the turning point. She had tried to scatter blame, but her words stacked like blocks pointing at two kittens in a broken glass bowl: Ellis and Professor Church.
The first round of reactions was loud and public. Students stood up. "Shame," someone said. One by one they told stories they hadn't told before: small favors they had missed, the times they had been overlooked because the slot had been taken by someone like Daniela. Phones went up. "Everybody sees you now," a voice shouted. "Everybody knows."
Daniela's demeanor collapsed. For the first time, private misery leaped into public spectacle. She started to cry. "I did it because I thought it would make something better," she said. "I wanted—" She couldn't finish before the words turned to a soundless sob.
Ellis looked at her, and then he looked at us, and his expression did something like a crack forming across a mirror. "We were wrong," he said, voice almost gone. "I'm sorry."
Then the real fall happened. People recorded, whispered, judged. A senator's aide—there because of the donor list—walked in the aisle, took a photo. A student knocked over their coffee. Someone applauded—not in praise, but in a small, vindictive rhythm as if the world had finally corrected itself.
Daniela's face went through stages: composed → shocked → denial → pleading → collapse. When she said, "It wasn't only me," it was the final moral tumble. Students hissed. "Who else?" they demanded.
Ellis's father called the donor a mistake; Professor Church found his voice lost. The dean announced immediate academic consequences: Daniela's scholarship rescinded, dean's probation placed on the professor, and Ellis's family's donation frozen pending an investigation. International news didn't come, but campus feeds lit up.
Daniela fell to her knees at the front, hands pressed to the floor like someone who wanted to hold the world steady. She begged. People pulled out their phones and filmed. Some in the crowd shook their heads; others walked away. A few students stood and offered cold, rational statements. "You hurt people," one said plainly. "You used pity to manufacture success and wound others."
"Apologize to her," someone demanded, pointing at Jayla and others who had been smeared.
Daniela looked up, tear tracks dark on her cheeks. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm so sorry."
But apology was a small cloth on a flood. The punishment that followed was not a single spectacle but a sequence: public confession, restitution, and social exiling. The department would not expel her immediately because of mitigating family concerns, but the trust was gone. People who had once smiled at her turned away. The dean's office posted the decisions; campus forums debated ethics like a sport. The professor resigned. Ellis's name was public as an accomplice because his donation had been central. His father's fury sent Ellis abroad, absentee and shamed.
When everything settled, Daniela left the university by choice—shunned, her carefully curated image ruined. Ellis left on a plane with a small suitcase and a heavy apology that had been worn thin by everyone who'd heard it.
The crowd's reactions were a chorus: whispers, clicks of camera shutters, the dull thud of people turning pages back in their own minds to see where they'd been complicit. Some students applauded when the dean finished. Others filed out with head bowed. Jayla remained silent but her eyes were hard and clean.
I felt hollow victory like pocket change—useful and cold. I had wanted the truth to come out and watched it burn slow and public. But in the ashes was evidence of what I had lost: the naive lore of a childhood that had believed in simple fairness.
"Will you press charges?" someone asked me later.
"No," I said. "What's been done is done. I wanted reconciliation for those who were hurt."
Leonardo Andersson—gentle, steady, the one who had lifted me from the sea—stayed. When Daniela entered and left the room, he didn't look away. He had become a quiet thread in my days: a text here, a cup of tea there, an offer to walk me home. He refused to be loud about it. He was not a savior in grand gestures; he fixed small things as if repairing a torn book page.
One chilly afternoon, when campus had shivered down to thin trees and the wind smelled of coming winter, Leonardo pushed open a classroom door with that calm, meeting my eyes like he had always been present in the way gravity was present.
"Do you want to get out of here?" he asked.
"Where?" I said.
"Anywhere," he said. "Back to the sea, maybe. Or to a place where people mean what they say."
He had a laugh that sounded like a locked door opening. "No games?" he said.
"No games," I answered.
He tied his scarf around my knee one day in a deserted study room so I wouldn't feel cold. "You look frozen," he said.
"Maybe I am," I said.
He smiled and said, "Then warm up with me."
We walked. He listened. He had a way of making the most ordinary things feel safe: handing me a napkin when my sleeve was wet, sitting through a bad lecture and nudging me awake when I nodded off. He wasn't loud with affection; he was steady with it.
"Why did you save me?" I asked once, in the dark of an exam period when our feet bumped under a single shared desk.
He looked at me like I mattered as if the question was simple and the answer was too. "Because you were there," he said. "Because someone has to do the right thing."
I laughed softly. "You didn't have to. Ellis did what he did and—"
"I wasn't Ellis," he said, and the sentence made more sense than anything else that week.
It took time. The taste of betrayal lingered in the back of my throat like salt. But Leonardo was patient in the way of tides that come back predictably, not in a sudden crash but in gentle reach.
One winter evening in a locked classroom, under a rectangle of weak sunlight, he turned to me and said, "Will you let me try?"
It was not dramatic. He knelt without fanfare and asked me to be his. I said yes because of small things: how he made sure my coffee wasn't too hot, how he remembered the exact way I liked a book spine turned, how he sat with my silence like a harbor.
Our first kiss was quiet and brave, no camera in sight, no crowd to appraise us. It was a small anchor placed in the middle of a messy life.
In the months that followed, campus moved on. Daniela's name receded into rumor. Ellis made a life somewhere with the weight of his choices. I learned to trust not because I had been given reasons to trust blindly but because I had been shown that someone could be consistent.
One night, looking at a small white flower Leonardo had given me—the one he'd called "my little garden" as a joke—I slipped it into a drawer. It was silly, sentimental and perfect.
Sometimes when the sea is loud and I can feel the pull of what might have been, I open the drawer, touch that pressed petal, and think of nets and choices and the quiet hands that saved me. I remember the hospital bed with its sharp lights, Ellis's apology like a cracking mirror, Daniela's collapse, and the long, careful way Leonardo showed up.
I do not romanticize the past. But I have learned that the sea can take things away, and the shore can return them in new forms. Danger made me more wary, but not brittle. Betrayal taught me to watch carefully and to claim truth.
The wound on my leg healed and left a faint white scar. Once, when I was afraid in the dark, Leonardo pulled his coat over our knees and held my hand. "It's only a scar," he whispered. "It tells a story, not the end of one."
"Then tell me the next," I said.
He smiled, and the small room filled with a quiet promise: to be present, to do the right thing one day at a time, and to leave the nets for fishermen.
The End
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