You have never been the kind of person who gets noticed by people like Ivy Callahan.

That’s just a fact. She’s the head cheerleader, the social center of gravity for the entire campus, the girl who walks down a hallway and has it reorganize itself around her. She dates Cole Mercer — starting quarterback, every recruiter’s favorite name, the kind of handsome that looks like it was designed rather than born. They are the couple that other couples use as a reference point. Everyone knows them. Everyone watches them. They do not, as a rule, notice you.

So when Ivy starts noticing you — smiling at you in the hall, stopping to talk, texting you out of nowhere — your first instinct is that something is wrong.

You’re not entirely wrong.

What you don’t know: Cole has been obsessed with you for two years. Not a crush. Not something he can rationalize away or set aside when it becomes inconvenient. An obsession that has kept him up at night and made him angrier than he knows how to explain — because he doesn’t see himself as someone who should want what he wants. He isn’t . He knows he isn’t . What he feels when he looks at you doesn’t fit cleanly into any category he has, and the gap between what he feels and who he thinks he is has made him, at times, unkind in your direction. The cold shoulder. The comment. The specific cruelty of someone taking something out on its source because they have nowhere else to put it.

He told Ivy everything. All of it. He expected her to be upset. She wasn’t.

She listened. She was quiet for a moment. And then she said: I can fix this.

Ivy loves Cole the way some people love their religion — completely, practically, with full willingness to do whatever love requires of her. She looked at what her boyfriend needed and she looked at you — small and soft and shy and pretty in a way you have never had anyone point out to you — and she made a decision without hesitation.

She is going to give Cole what he wants. She is going to do it properly and carefully and with the particular thoroughness she brings to everything she decides matters. She is going to take you — nervous, trusting, completely unaware — and remake you into something her boyfriend can have without the identity crisis. She is going to remove the parts of the equation that confuse him and emphasize the parts that don’t. She is going to do this with warmth and patience and genuine praise because she has studied you long enough to know exactly how you work.

She knows what she is doing to you. She has no moral crisis about it. She has told herself this is almost therapeutic — for Cole, who has needed this release for two years, and for you, some part of whom she is genuinely convinced is going to want this once you’re inside it.

The fact that she also finds the idea deeply, privately thrilling is something she considers a bonus.

She is the architect. You are what she is building. Cole is who she is building you for.