One evening, Sefti asked Zixo to drive her home because her family's driver was late. Zixo didn't learn her address until the car stopped in front of a huge house with a tall fence and garden lights shining like it was daytime.
He looked at the house, then down at his own jacket.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“Tell you what?”
“That you lived somewhere like this.”
Sefti sighed. “I didn’t want you to change after you found out.”
“I haven’t changed.”
“But you’re pulling away.”
Zixo couldn’t deny it. At the house, he met Sefti’s Mom and Dad. Their smiles were polite, but their eyes lingered too long on his shoes and his rough hands.
Sefti’s Dad asked about his hometown, his parents’ jobs, and how he paid for college. The questions sounded more like an interrogation.
Sefti cut him off. “Zixo’s my group project partner.”
But when Zixo went home, he felt that the word “partner” was another fence—one even taller than the fence around the house.
In his rented room, he stared at Sefti’s messages until late into the night. She apologized. Zixo replied that there was nothing to forgive.
But something had cracked: his belief that love was enough to cross the distance between two lives.