Chapter 1
Chapter One
The book had been buried beneath the Gulmohar tree for years.
I was not supposed to find it.
I remember the shovel striking something beneath the soil.
I stopped and knelt down.
It was something rectangular.
A book.
Its cover was faded, its edges softened by moisture and earth. I brushed the dirt away and lifted it carefully.
The pages were old, but they did not seem old enough to have spent decades underground.
I opened it.
There was no name on the cover. Nothing inside explained who had written it or why it had been buried beneath the tree.
The first pages looked like a diary.
There were dates.
There were ordinary moments.
A river.
Rain.
Books.
Cookies.
A blue coat.
A Gulmohar tree.
And a girl named Ren.
A boy named Emrys appeared soon after.
The more I read, the less it felt like a diary written to record important events.
It felt like someone had been afraid of losing ordinary ones.
The handwriting changed halfway through.
The earlier pages carried different moods. Some lines were neat and deliberate. Others were hurried, with words pressed unevenly into the paper.
Then, almost without warning, the handwriting became different.
Balanced.
Precise.
Careful.
I ran my finger beneath one of the lines.
The name Ren appeared again.
Then Emrys.
Sometimes she called him by his name.
Sometimes he wrote about her.
There was no explanation of who he was, but after a while, I stopped wondering.
The book felt like it belonged to him.
I turned another page.
A date.
Then another.
The dates did not always agree.
Some belonged years apart. Others seemed to contradict what had already happened.
I looked back at the beginning.
For a moment, I wondered whether the writer had simply forgotten.
Then I noticed something.
A sentence had been crossed out.
I could still make out a few words beneath the ink.
I thought I remembered...
The rest was impossible to read.
I closed the book.
Above me, the Gulmohar moved gently in the wind.
Then I opened it again.
Whatever had happened to Emrys and Ren, it had begun somewhere inside these pages.
And I wanted to know where.
I turned to the first page.
I began to read.
