Chapter 1
If We Had Forever
When Maya met Liam, it was raining.
Not the romantic kind of rain that falls softly in movies. It was the annoying, sideways kind that soaks your socks and frizzes your hair and makes you hate the sky.
She was seventeen and running late for school, clutching her backpack over her head as if canvas could stop water. She didn’t see him until she collided straight into his chest.
Her books scattered into a puddle.
“Oh my God — I’m so sorry!” he said, immediately kneeling down to rescue her soaked notes.
She wanted to be angry. She really did.
But he looked so genuinely distressed, rain dripping from his eyelashes, that she laughed instead.
“It’s just algebra,” she said. “Maybe the universe is trying to save me.”
He smiled at that. It was the kind of smile that didn’t try too hard. Soft. Slightly crooked.
“I’m Liam,” he said.
And just like that, her life split into two parts:
Before Liam.
And After.
They grew up together in the way only first loves do.
They studied at the same scratched wooden table in the local library. They shared fries because neither of them ever had enough money for two full meals. They talked about leaving their small town like it was something temporary, like the place itself understood it wasn’t meant to keep them.
“Three years,” Liam would say, lying on the hood of his old car, staring at the stars. “We’ll save. We’ll work. Then we’re out.”
“To where?” she’d ask.
“Anywhere with tall buildings and bad coffee and too many people.”
She’d laugh. “That sounds terrible.”
He’d turn his head to look at her. “Not if you’re there.”
He always said things like that casually. As if loving her was as natural as breathing.
When they turned twenty-two, they had a plan.
An apartment in the city. Small, but theirs. Liam had already picked out the area online — close to a park for the dog they would adopt.
“Atlas,” he’d decided.
“Why Atlas?”
“Because he’ll carry the weight of our chaotic lives.”
“You’re dramatic.”
“Only professionally.”
They talked about paint colors for walls they hadn’t seen. About jobs they hadn’t secured yet. About babies in the far, far future when they were “responsible adults.”
Forever felt guaranteed.
It felt promised.
The night everything changed was ordinary.
That’s what made it cruel.
There were no warning signs. No storm clouds. No dramatic music swelling in the background.
Just a Tuesday.
Maya had stayed home to finish an application. Liam had gone out to grab coffee and clear his head after a long shift.
At 11:47 p.m., her phone rang.
Liam.
She almost didn’t answer because she was in the middle of rewriting a sentence.
She would replay that decision a thousand times later.
“Hey,” he said when she picked up.
His voice sounded different. Not sad. Not scared. Just… thoughtful.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, I just — I wanted to hear you.”
She smiled, tucking the phone between her ear and shoulder. “You saw me like four hours ago.”
“I know.”
Silence hummed between them. Not uncomfortable. Just full.
“I love you,” he said suddenly.
She rolled her eyes affectionately. “You’re acting weird.”
“Just say it back.”
She softened. “I love you too. Always.”
He exhaled, long and steady.
“Good,” he whispered.
There was the faint sound of traffic.
“Drive safe,” she said.
“I will.”
That was the last promise he ever made.
At 12:08 a.m., someone ran a red light.
At 12:09 a.m., metal screamed against metal.
At 12:10 a.m., strangers were pulling Liam from what used to be his car.
At 12:47 a.m., Maya’s phone rang again.
But it wasn’t Liam.
Grief doesn’t arrive all at once.
It seeps in.
First, there’s shock — a numb, floating feeling. The hospital lights were too bright. The doctor’s lips moved too slowly. Words like “impact” and “internal bleeding” and “we did everything we could” bounced around her head without landing.
She waited for Liam to sit up.
To laugh and say, “Got you.”
But he didn’t move.
His hand was still warm when she held it.
She memorized that warmth.
Because she knew it wouldn’t last.
The days after blurred into casseroles and condolences.
“I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Loss.
As if he were a misplaced wallet.
As if she could check under the couch cushions and find him.
She stopped sleeping. When she did close her eyes, she dreamed of red lights she couldn’t stop.
She stopped answering friends.
She stopped planning.
The apartment listing stayed bookmarked on her laptop, untouched.
One evening, three weeks after the funeral, she found his hoodie behind her bedroom door.
It still smelled like him.
Laundry detergent and something warm and uniquely Liam.
She sank to the floor with it clutched in her hands.
That was the first time she screamed.
Not cried.
Screamed.
Because the world had the audacity to keep existing.
Cars still drove past her house. Birds still sang. The sun still rose like nothing had shattered.
How could everything look so normal when nothing was?
Months passed.
Grief changed shape.
It stopped being sharp and became heavy.
A constant weight on her chest.
She returned to the library one day, sitting at their usual table. Her fingers traced the scratches in the wood.
She could almost see him there — tapping his pen, pretending to study while actually watching her.
“Focus,” she used to scold.
“Can’t. You’re distracting.”
She smiled at the memory.
And for the first time, the memory didn’t break her completely.
It hurt.
But it also felt warm.
On the one-year anniversary of the accident, she drove to the intersection.
The red light blinked above her.
Cars moved through it carefully.
Ordinary.
She stepped out of her car and stood on the sidewalk.
“This is where forever ended,” she whispered.
But as she stood there, something shifted.
Forever hadn’t ended.
It had just changed.
Because Liam wasn’t only in the crash.
He was in the way she still ordered fries and left one untouched because she was used to sharing.
He was in the way she looked at the stars and counted them like they used to.
He was in the courage she found to finally submit her application to the city.
He had loved her in a way that stretched beyond time.
And that kind of love doesn’t die at intersections.
Two years later, she moved.
Not because the pain was gone.
But because he would have told her to.
The apartment was small.
The coffee was terrible.
The city was loud.
She adopted a dog.
Not Atlas.
She couldn’t use the name they chose together.
She named him Orion instead — another constellation.
Because Liam had loved the stars.
Some nights, when the city quiets and the loneliness creeps in, she plays his last voicemail.
She doesn’t collapse the way she used to.
She just listens.
To the way his voice wraps around her name.
To the way love sounds when it doesn’t know it’s about to become a memory.
And she whispers back into the dark,
“We didn’t get forever the way we planned.
But you are in every tomorrow I live.”
And somewhere between heartbreak and healing, she understands:
The cruelest thing about love
is that it can end without warning.
And the most beautiful thing about love
is that it never really leaves. 💔
