Chapter 1
People think heartbreak starts after love ends.
Mine started before it ever began.
The first time I saw Mira, it was raining.
Not the dramatic, thunder-splitting kind—
Just a dull, drizzling sadness, as if the sky itself had lost interest in pretending it was okay.
I was standing under the school’s old archway, headphones in, hands in my pockets, pretending
I didn’t feel the drops soaking through my sleeves. I liked that corner. Nobody looked at me there. No one ever did.
That’s when she walked past.
Or rather—she didn’t.
She stopped.
She looked right at me.
“You’re Ren,right?”
1
Her voice wasn’t loud. It was almost awkward, like she wasn’t used to talking to people like me—
Or maybe people like me weren’t used to being spoken to at all.
I didn’t answer. I just tilted my head, pretending to be confused.
But inside, I was wondering how she even knew my name.
She continued anyway.
“I sit two rows behind you in class. You dropped this.”
She held out a pencil.
My pencil.
I hadn’t even realized I lost it.
“It has a sketch of a bird on it,” she said with a smile, “and it looked too sad to be left on the floor.”
I stared at her.
Who notices the sadness in a bird sketch on a pencil?
She didn’t wait for thanks.
Didn’t flinch from my silence.
She just smiled once more—quick, genuine, too real for this grey day—and walked away.
And for the first time in months…
I looked away from the ground.
