Chapter 1
AURORA
I woke up to the echo of digital gunfire and sharp American voices cutting through the thin wall as if it were made of waterlogged paper. It wasn't real gunpowder—it never was anything that raw or definitive; it was just Luca’s game, that first-person shooter he’d kept burning since three in the morning, headphones hung around his neck like a forgotten necklace, the volume high enough so that every detonation, every shouted command in English, every "enemy spotted" invaded my room with the insistence of someone who refuses to be contained.
I lay motionless with my eyes open in the gloom, the yellowed ceiling slowly gaining shape—first the damp patches that no one knew how to fix, then the crack that started near the light fitting and vanished into the corner like a dry river. I listened to his commands muttered between teeth: "fuck, take that, don't run." His voice was still thick with sleep, or perhaps already too tired to project. I had that exhausted patience of someone who had long since lost count of the hours and learned, after fifteen years of sharing the same air, that exploding before seven only generated arguments that neither of us had the energy to finish.
Fifteen years. I was eighteen. He was fifteen. Our ages added up to thirty-three—the same number of years my mother was when she buried my father. The math of our family was never beautiful.
The clock on my phone, when I reached for it on the makeshift bedside table—a wooden crate Luca found in the rubbish and painted black, though the paint peeled in thin strips like sunburnt skin—marked 6:43. Outside the window, London presented itself in its usual grey. Not the poetic grey of postcards, the kind tourists photograph with nostalgic captions. It was the washed-out, heavy grey that seeped through the gaps of the window frame, warped since the previous winter when Luca had tried to fix it and only succeeded in making the wood even more rebellious.
The cold settled on my skin like an unwanted second layer. Damp. Sticky. Answering the need for the portable heater that devoured kilowatts as if it had a hunger of its own. My mother had left a note stuck to the hallway mirror last week: "If you turn on the heater, you pay the bill. The bill isn't mine." She wrote in capital letters when she was angry. Capital letters and red pen. I hadn't turned on the heater since. I preferred the cold to the argument.
I sat up slowly, calculating every movement so as not to make the springs creak. The mattress was deeper on one side where the bed slats had given way about a year ago. I already knew the topography of my days: the hollow where my back fit, the edge where I rested my book before sleeping, the corner where the sheet always slipped because the elastic no longer held.
The room was exactly the size of my life there.
A single bed with sheets that had known better days—the original colours were grey and white, but now the grey had turned to charcoal dust and the white to the pale yellow of a smoker’s tooth. A desk chair buried under clean clothes I hadn't folded since Thursday, because folding required believing that tomorrow I’d have time to put them away, and I had stopped believing in that. The white MDF bookshelf overflowed with books piled haphazardly—some horizontal over the vertical ones, others leaning against each other like dominoes on the verge of collapse, the rest left on the floor because there was no more room, because the space ran out and the books kept coming, second-hand books bought for fifty pence at charity shops, books I hadn't read yet but needed to have nearby, as if their presence were proof that I was smart enough to get out of here one day.
Out to where? The question always came, and I never had an answer.
The window looked out onto the dark red brick building across the street, those stubborn Victorian bricks that London refused to let fall. The thin curtain, bought at a Poundland sale last spring, let in the orange light of the streetlamp all night long. It wasn't beautiful. It was mine. And I had learned, too early, after my father's death, that "mine" and "beautiful" rarely meant the same thing; "ours" had ceased to be a synonym for safety and had become merely whatever had not yet been taken.
I picked up the phone and stayed paralysed for thirty full seconds—not out of laziness, but for that rare and fragile instant that precedes the day actually beginning. Everything still suspended, in an unstable equilibrium between what was and what would be. I was just a warm body under a worn duvet, slow breathing, heavy eyes. Without needing to be a sister, a student, an employee, or a daughter. Without carrying the weight of being someone for someone. Without begging for approval with every gesture.
Then I heard Luca let out a longer, drawn-out curse—a "fuck it" loaded with the frustration accumulated after forty minutes of wasted investment—and the moment dissolved.
I got up before he remembered the bathroom existed. It was a precise, millimetric choreography, like those platform games where a wrong jump throws you into the abyss. Luca was fifteen years old, nearly six feet tall, with a shadow of a beard he called style but was pure economy of effort, and long hair that "gave him a mature look" when in reality it only revealed laziness. And, above all, he possessed the natural talent of male teenagers to monopolise any shared space—bathroom, fridge, Wi-Fi—without an ounce of guilt, as if the world had been designed to serve him first.
If I didn't get there first, I’d wait forty minutes outside while he did whatever fifteen-year-old boys do in a bathroom for forty minutes. I didn't want to think about what it was. I already knew. I’d already heard the locked doors, the disguised sounds, the suspicious silence. It wasn't my job to police my brother's masturbation. God, what a horrible sentence. I shook my head as if I could shake the thought out.
If I didn't get there first, I’d wait forty minutes outside while he did whatever fifteen-year-old boys do in a bathroom for forty minutes. I didn't want to think about what it was. I already knew. I’d already heard the locked doors, the disguised sounds, the suspicious silence. It wasn't my job to police my brother's masturbation. God, what a horrible sentence. I shook my head as if I could shake the thought out.
I opened the bedroom door with the care of someone disarming an unstable device. The hallway was dark; the ceiling light had finished its life three weeks ago and no one had bought a replacement because remembering required energy none of us possessed. The blue light from his monitor leaked under the door, pulsing as the colours on the screen changed. I passed the door in silence, bare feet on the cold linoleum I knew by heart—the seams between the planks, the small unevenness near the kitchen where I used to trip as a child until I learned to swerve automatically.
I reached the bathroom. Closed the door. Turned the key. The dry metallic click was the only guarantee of privacy. The lock was weak, you could open it with a credit card, but Luca would never go to the effort. He respected a closed door.
I breathed.
The air smelled of cheap coconut soap bought by the gallon by my mother, mixed with the mould that insisted on staying in the grout despite all the bleach in the world. The small window, left slightly ajar, let in the humidity from the street; a spiderweb occupied the top right corner like an old signature.
The mirror had a thin crack in the bottom corner, branching out like a dry river since the day my mother had hit it with the toolbox in a futile attempt to fix the tap that still dripped. I had learned to position myself slightly to the left to see myself whole, without the line cutting the reflection in half. Small adaptations. Life was made of them.
I looked at myself with the coldness of someone who no longer has patience for lies.
Hair the colour of tea with milk, completely curled on one side by the night’s humidity, flattened on the other where the pillow had pressed. Amber eyes with marks of sleep on the lower edges—not those purple dark circles of a bad night's sleep, but a permanent darkening, a shadow that had settled in. Freckles darker on my nose and cheekbones, drawn by the cold as if the city wanted to mark territory on my skin.
I turned on the tap and waited the two and a half minutes of metallic hissing until the water warmed up. Meanwhile, I rested my hands on the stained porcelain of the sink and thought, like every morning, that today I needed to get it right. Not in great gestures. Just get it right: show up, be present, not let the weight of what I couldn't control—the money that never arrived, Luca’s grades falling silently, my mother’s shifts that turned her into a shadow—crush me before lunch.
You can do it. You always do. You have no choice.
The water got hot. I stepped into the shower.
I let it fall first on the back of my neck, where my muscles carried the tension of sleeping wrong. Then on my shoulders, feeling the knots undo one by one, like ropes being untied by invisible hands. It ran down my back, my legs, my feet. I closed my eyes.
For eight minutes, the world was reduced to the steam blurring the cracked mirror, the rhythmic sound of drops on the acrylic, the relative silence of a flat still half-asleep. It was the only part of the day I didn't share with anyone. I guarded it with almost religious seriousness, as if every drop were a reminder that I still existed beyond my obligations.
You still exist, I whispered to myself. You are still here.
When I stepped out, the steam took a long time to dissipate. I wiped the towel over my body—the fluffy towel that was once soft and now felt like sandpaper, bought at the same sale as the curtain, because everything in my life seemed to come from the same sale—and got dressed: black jeans, a white t-shirt, an oversized grey jumper that once belonged to my father and that I could never throw away. The sleeves covered half of my hands. The fabric was thin on the back, where years of use had left the cotton transparent. But it smelled like him. Or it smelled like the memory of him. I no longer knew the difference.
The kitchen smelled of burnt coffee and the toast Luca had left on the plate next to the dishwasher—never inside, because putting it inside required an effort he wasn't willing to make. He was sitting in the chair that creaked when he leaned back, bare feet on the linoleum, eyes fixed on his phone while the computer in his room kept running the game and wasting energy we paid for. The stubble caught the faint light from the window and gave him the look of someone ten years older.
There was something in the jaw, in the contour of the face, that for a painful second reminded me of my father on his days off. Him sitting in the same position, clean-shaven because he’d done it the night before, reading the paper in the living room while I sat at his feet on the shaggy rug my mother hated because it trapped dust. He would run his hand through my hair without looking, distracted, affectionate, present. His hand was warm and heavy, and I would close my eyes and feel that nothing could hurt me as long as that hand was there.
Nothing hurt me until he died.
Luca opened his mouth and the moment dissolved.
"There’s no milk," he said, without looking up from his phone.
"Good morning to you too," I replied, opening the fridge.
"There’s no milk," he repeated, as if the greeting were background noise, as if "good morning" were a foreign language he didn't speak.
The fridge was sad. Half a bottle of orange juice that expired yesterday—it’ll still do, I thought, I’ve drunk worse. Two lonely eggs in the broken plastic compartment. A strawberry yoghurt I had marked with my name on the lid in black pen, because Luca didn't respect invisible borders, only written ones. A scrap of butter the size of a coin, with knife marks from other mornings.
I closed the door carefully; the dried-out rubber made a sucking groan. Another thing to fix. Another line on the mental list I carried that grew like a snowball, and me in the middle trying to push the snow out of the way with my bare hands.
"You'll have to buy some on your way home from school," I warned, filling the kettle at the sink.
"I don't have money."
"I know you don't."
I took two pounds and seventy-five pence from my wallet—what was left of last week's lunch money, which I’d saved by eating only an apple a day—and placed it on the table next to the abandoned toast. He took the money and stuffed it into his hoodie pocket without comment, without thanks, without even a nod of the head.
I didn't expect one.
There was an emotional economy between us that worked like this: I didn't ask for recognition, he didn't pretend enthusiasm. We survived. It was what we could do. Survive.
"Did you eat?" I asked, though I already knew the answer.
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because there’s no milk." He finally looked up, and there was a tiredness there that wasn't just from the game, that came from somewhere deeper, older. "And cereal without milk is sad."
"You can have toast."
"Toast without butter is sad."
"There is butter."
"There’s a scrap of butter." He paused. "And it’s sad."
I took a deep breath. Counted to three. He’s fifteen. He’s an idiot because he’s fifteen. Not because he hates you.
"I’m making coffee. Do you want some?"
"Coffee gives me heartburn."
"You’re fifteen. You don't have heartburn."
"I’ve had heartburn since I was twelve. Inheritance from Dad."
My father's name floated between us like a ghost. We avoided it, most days, as if saying "Dad" would open a door we had nailed shut. But sometimes it escaped—in a gesture, in an expression, in a stray word—and the silence that followed was always the same: heavy, guilty, full of things neither of us knew how to say.
"Have tea then," I offered.
"Tea without milk is sad."
"Is everything sad for you today?"
"Everything is sad for me every day, Aurora. Haven't you noticed yet?"
He said it without malice. Without self-pity, either. It was a statement. A fact. Like saying the sky is grey or water is wet. My younger brother's truth was this: sadness was the bottom of the pit where he lived, and he had stopped trying to climb out.
I made fresh coffee with the rest of the packet. While the water heated, I ate the yoghurt standing at the counter, spoonful by spoonful, looking through the foggy window at the woman passing by with a red umbrella fighting the wind. The umbrella turned inside out with every gust, and the woman cursed out loud, and I smiled to myself, because it was early and I hadn't yet lost all capacity to find humour in small things.
"You have school today," I reminded him when the coffee was ready. The smell rose, hot and bitter, filling the kitchen like a blessing.
"I know."
"It’s seven twenty-five."
"I know, Aurora."
My name came out with that slight exasperation I’d known forever: Luca, my mother when she was tired, teachers who saw me as hardworking but never brilliant. I had heard my name like that so many times that the weight of every syllable had become familiar, almost comfortable. Aurora. Au-ro-ra. Three syllables that no one said with affection.
But I had also heard it another way—from my mother's mouth on the rare Sundays when she laughed at my jokes, her voice still soft before the third consecutive shift. From my father, who pronounced it as if I were something precious and fragile he kept with pride, like a trophy he hadn't expected to win.
I drank the coffee in silence, the mug warm between my hands, the bitterness burning my tongue. Luca went back to looking at his phone. The computer in the bedroom triggered a new round of shots. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat. The sound cut through the wall as if the wall didn't exist.
I washed the mug—it took a while because the coffee had stained the bottom and I had to scrub with the old sponge—dried my hands on my hoodie, grabbed my backpack, my coat, and the keys from the cracked bowl my mother bought at a street market and never replaced because it still served its purpose.
"Don't be late back," I said, already with my hand on the door handle, the cold metal handle that had been peeling for about two winters.
"I’m never late."
A lie we both knew. He came home late every week, and I waited up, listening to the footsteps in the hallway, counting the seconds between the sound of the key and the closing of the door, until he was safe inside.
But it wasn't a morning for arguments.
I closed the door behind me.
The flat hallway smelled of mould, of cigarettes from the neighbours on the second floor, of weed from flat 2B. The ground floor light was finished too, but no one complained because no one expected anything to work. I went down the two flights of stairs in the dark, hand on the sticky railing, feet knowing every step by heart.
I lit the first cigarette still on the stairs, before reaching the ground floor.
The first drag was honest, bitter, hot, with the taste of cheap tobacco that I associated with the instant the day stopped being a possibility and became a reality. The smoke rose, met the damp patches on the concrete, and dissolved slowly as I descended the last steps.
The street smelled of wet stone, bus exhaust, and something ancient, mineral, trapped in the bricks of the Victorian buildings that resisted demolition out of sheer stubbornness. Elephant and Castle woke up with noise even when it tried to be silent—the cars, the buses, the bike couriers swearing at minicab drivers.
I liked this organised indifference of the city. London didn't care if I was happy or exhausted, if the money would arrive or if I’d have to borrow again. It simply was. And in that, there was a strange freedom: being just another face in the crowd, with no need to perform, no obligation to be interesting or pleasant or grateful. Just to exist.
The rain had turned into a fine mist that settled on the skin like a layer of cold glass. The cigarette got damp at the tip, the paper wrinkling, the ember hissing when the moisture met it. I kept smoking anyway.
I stopped at the tube gate, tapped my Oyster card, and went down the escalators with my hand on the cold handrail. The tunnel smelled of iron, of electricity, of the crowd that hadn't yet arrived. I positioned myself at the exact spot on the platform where the second carriage stopped—a coordinate I’d discovered after months of trial and error, the place where the train stopped exactly in front of me so I could board without fighting for space with other passengers.
The train arrived with the hot, ferrous wind of the tunnel, a gust that messed up my damp hair and made me close my eyes for a second. I found a spot standing near the door, one earbud in, the other out so as not to lose total awareness of what was happening around me. I leaned my back against the metal bar, feeling the vibration climb my spine, and let my gaze drift across the carriage without focusing.
Faces. Coats. Dark circles. Phones. My distorted reflection in the dark glass of the window—a blur of light hair and a grey hoodie.
Eighteen years old. The first real day. You can do this. You have to do this.
I got out at King's Cross, lit the second cigarette, and walked the eight minutes to campus. The mist had thickened, and the buildings around looked as if they were drawn in watercolour, the edges dissolving into the white. I stopped at the stone wall to the left of the entrance, as always. Two minutes leaning against the cold granite, smoking, observing the movement like someone calculating currents before diving in.
The campus woke up against its will: small groups forming on the pavement, steam from coffee rising from thermal mugs, low voices of people who hadn't yet decided if they were ready to interact with other human beings. Wet footsteps on the tarmac. Black umbrellas opening and closing like mechanical flowers.
I crushed the butt against the wall, tucked it in my pocket, and adjusted my backpack on my shoulder. I pushed the heavy glass door and went inside.
The lobby smelled of disinfectant and old paper. The security guard at the entrance, a bald man with thick glasses, knew me by sight and nodded. I nodded back. Small courtesies. Life was made of them.
The Introduction to Constitutional Law room was on the second floor, the third door after the stairs. It smelled of old books and a gas heater that creaked every ten minutes, a metallic and sad sound like the moan of an old animal. Dark wood chairs, textured tables full of the scars of past generations—initials carved with penknives, pen drawings, coffee stains that no one ever cleaned.
I arrived five minutes early. I chose the third row. Neither too far forward, where the professor might notice me out of convenience. Nor too far back, where I would be just one among those who don't want to be seen. In the middle. The place of safety. The place for those who observe without being observed.
I took out my black-covered notebook, uncapped my fine-tipped blue pen. I looked at the blank whiteboard.
Introduction to Constitutional Law — Prof. T. Sterling.
I knew almost nothing about him besides the name and the title. Short, dry emails, no frills. Dense academic articles full of words I had to look up in the dictionary. An institutional photo that revealed nothing—a man in a suit, neutral expression, looking at the camera as if he were looking through it.
The heater creaked. I counted the seconds until the next creak. Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.
Then I heard footsteps in the corridor.
They weren't the footsteps of a late student—those are fast, irregular, full of guilt and the hope that the professor hasn't started yet. They weren't the footsteps of the cleaning staff—those are dragging, accompanied by the sound of buckets and brooms.
They were heavy, regular, measured footsteps. The cadence of someone who doesn't need to hurry because the space already belongs to them. Soles against the stone. Click. Click. Click. Pause. Click. Click. Click.
Someone who walks as if they are in command of everything around them.
I looked up without meaning to.
And Professor Sterling walked in.
