Jazz yanked the comforter over her head, refusing to get out of bed and answer the door. She put in earbuds so she wouldn’t have to listen to Nathan’s pleas for forgiveness at eight in the morning for the tenth day in a row.

Ten days.

Ten long, impossible days since she’d left the wedding reception and him.

The worst part was seeing him every day and in every place. Nowhere felt safe. Nowhere felt like it belonged to her and her alone.

If finals hadn’t been around the corner, she’d have taken a bus up to Burton and spent a few days with Bethany to get farther away from Nathan, but Jazz couldn’t escape the memories. Those would haunt her for a long time, as would the future that would never be.

All she wanted was to find peace, but Nathan wouldn’t give her that.

Her mom had worked so hard, fought so hard, to keep their house—and now that same house had turned into a prison.

She felt like a convict trying to escape whenever she snuck through the backdoor, hoping to escape Nathan’s notice.

But he’d made a full-time job of staking her out, of waiting for her to come around.

But come around for what?

He refused to get married, and she refused to be strung along without a commitment. That was it. End of story.

End of them.

She listened to the new Taylor Swift album before taking out her earbuds and trying to discern whether the ghost of relationships past was still haunting her doorway.

When she didn’t hear anything, she glanced out her window toward Nathan’s room. Old habits die hard. She still looked into his window several times a day, still wondered how he would react to the little things happening during her day, still thought of him constantly.

It wasn’t fair.

This time, however, Nathan wasn’t sitting at his desk or lounging in his favorite beanbag chair. Instead, a giant piece of turquoise paperboard blocked his window from view. A giant swatch of hastily scratched marker formed a single word.

Or rather, hashtag.

#N8nJZ4e

Cute. Irritating. Uniquely Nathan.

He was the first to jump on the bandwagon for any and all new social media sites. Jazz, on the other hand, didn’t want perfect strangers giving the thumbs up to her personal photos, so she rarely logged in to check her Facebook account.

She should update her relationship status, though. Would she pick single or it’s complicated? Was she single now, or would one of them cave so the two of them could make up and move on?

Jazz refused to change her views on marriage. Just because things hadn’t worked for her parents and they weren’t working for Nathan’s parents didn’t mean marriage couldn’t work for anyone.

Especially them.

#N8nJZ4e

Darn it. Now she had to check. Hashtags were Twitter, right?

She grabbed her laptop and navigated to Nathan’s Twitter account. She didn’t have one of her own, but his posts were public. And the last several dozen—maybe even a few hundred—of them were tagged with #N8nJZ4e.

She scrolled the feed until she found the tweet marked number one.

Oh, boy. Had he really tweeted about their breakup one thousand times? If so, why? She shuddered at the thought of all those strangers knowing her private business. Nathan loved the spectacle, while she had been more introverted. Yet another way they were completely and irreconcilably different.

Why hadn’t she seen it before?

She sighed and began reading the tweets tagged #N8nJZ4e.

Jazz rolled her eyes, which had already begun to wet with tears. Leave it to Nathan to put her on the spot, but also leave it to Nathan to break her heart and then follow up with the perfect plan to piece it back together again.

Jazz zipped through the tweets as fast as she could read them. Each was a 140-character love poem written to her. Sure, everyone could see, but only she held the memories of her life—for it had truly been a life—with Nathan.

He recounted details she didn’t know about herself, like how her eyes turned gray when she was feeling sad and she talked from the side of her mouth whenever she told a joke. He shared their moments over the last three years, but also what came in the years before.

He remembered them all and carried them in his heart, just as she had.

When she reached the top of the page, she saw that Nathan was still tweeting rapid-fire. He was going to see this through. One thousand tweets. She clicked refresh and read the latest in his stream.

She swiped at her tears, wondering how much more Nathan would say. She loved reading the kind words about her, but she also wanted—no, needed—to get to him. He had extended her an olive branch. She needed to grab it tight and never let go, never let go of them again.

Even though she wore a ratty old pair of pajamas riddled with holes and her hair was an impossible mess of tangles and frizz, she ran straight down the stairs, out her door, and over to the house next door.

She ran straight to Nathan.

Just as she always had.

And she never ever wanted to stop running toward him again.