Three Years Later

Time, as I would come to learn, has a way of dulling old wounds and sharpening purpose.

The Alpha Academy had a way of burning you down and rebuilding you into something stronger, or breaking you completely. I wasn’t sure which it had done to me until the final year, when the trials began.

Three years had passed since that morning in the mess hall. Three years since I stopped hiding who I was from the two people who mattered most.

And in those years, we had become something none of us expected, an unshakable triad.

Kennedy, with his unrelenting courage and sometimes infuriating honesty, became my...