Haruhi doesn't recall when, or how it happened. But it did.
Time passing. Seconds flying into minutes, minutes flying into hours, hours flying into days and years and suddenly high school is over and they're thrown out there, by themselves, on their own.
The twins disappear. She wonders if she has anything to do with it; maybe it was her rejection. Her stinging, ignorant, flat-out rejection of Hikaru that made them crawl back into their self-centered twin bubble. Haruhi knows it could've gone better than, "I'm sorry, Hikaru. I just don't view you in that sense," and even she knows that was faintly (faintly doesn't cover it) cold-hearted for a rejection. Kaoru had said, "You could've at least tried," after school, and she consciously ignored the fact that they had been slightly different around her in those last years. Guilt didn't suit her well.
Kyouya becomes the Ootori heir. Big whoop. Everyone knew it was to happen, him being so goddamn brilliant and everything. He goes out with a bang, and no one ever hears of him again, except in the news.
Mori and Hunny study abroad in England and Germany. She gets postcards from time to time, and the sight makes her heart clench every time with the painful and pitiful reminder of what could've been.
Tamaki. She can barely stand to think his name, let alone say it. His rejection is the more depressing of the two rejections she had given out.
"Tamaki, I… I don't think I could ever love you like that…"
"I understand."
The words had come out of her mouth before she knew it happened, and then there was humiliation etched upon his face, and then there was regret, and then there was the awkwardness between them, and then there was this. She was familiar with it; she had read many books about it.
Heartbreak.
Haruhi had spent many nights (alone, just like always) tossing and turning. Wondering why she didn't try to get him back after school when she could've. Wondering why she didn't realize she loved him with all her heart and soul back when it would've mattered. Wondering why she would end up alone just like before she met the host club (although, she knew the answer to that one). Study, study, study, study. Now where was she? A relatively rich lawyer, middle-aged, with no boyfriend or husband? That was the ideal life she had been setting herself up for. It didn't seem so ideal now, bitter and alone.
She got the full impact when she saw him with his wife, his gorgeous, perfect, adoring French wife. She was as eccentric as he was, and perhaps twice as angelic. They were beautiful, their children would be beautiful, and their life was beautiful.
And Haruhi, the lowly commoner, did not fit into the exquisite jigsaw puzzle of their life. Of anyone's life from the Host Club, come to think of it.
Not even if she tried to jam her pieces in.