Chapter 1
He had been gone for only a few hours.
Six months.
That was how long he was supposed to be away.
Six months in the United States.
Six months away from me.
I kept telling myself it wasn’t that long. People left for years. They crossed oceans for their studies, their careers, their dreams. They came back.
Six months was nothing.
At least, that’s what I tried to believe.
I was sitting alone in my apartment in Grenoble.
My apartment.
Sometimes, even now, it still felt strange to call it that.
There was a bag on a chair, clothes waiting to be folded on the couch, and a cup of coffee slowly going cold on the table.
An ordinary evening.
An ordinary life.
Except that someone was missing from it.
Adam.
For the first time since we had started getting closer, he was truly far away.
And this time, I couldn’t simply wait a few days until I saw him again.
There was an ocean between us.
I looked at my phone lying beside me.
One message.
Then another.
Nothing extraordinary.
Just a few words.
Yet I read them again.
And again.
It was ridiculous.
We hadn’t even had enough time to give a real name to whatever existed between us.
We hadn’t been together for years.
We hadn’t made huge promises.
We hadn’t built a life together.
We were simply at the beginning of something.
And maybe that was exactly what scared me.
Beginnings are fragile.
You never know whether they will become a story or remain nothing more than a beautiful memory.
With Adam, though, something had changed.
For the first time, what I felt wasn’t only happening inside my head.
There had been looks.
Conversations.
Moments we shared.
Silences that no longer felt uncomfortable.
Smiles I didn’t have to interpret.
Little gestures that seemed to say what we were still too afraid to say out loud.
And most importantly, there had been a moment when I realized I wasn’t the only one feeling something.
There really was something between us.
Something fragile.
Something new.
Something we hadn’t had enough time to understand.
And then he left.
The United States was waiting for him.
A training program.
An opportunity.
A life that was continuing on his side while mine continued here.
I had known he was leaving.
I had known for a while.
But knowing something and living through it are two completely different things.
A few hours earlier, I had watched him leave.
And now I was here.
Alone in my apartment.
With that strange feeling of having returned to a time when everything was still uncertain.
I got up and walked toward the window.
Grenoble was quiet.
Lights glowed in the windows of distant buildings.
Cars moved through the streets.
People were going home.
Someone laughed somewhere below.
The world continued.
As if nothing had changed.
While, for me, something had.
I wondered how I had ended up here.
How had a girl born in Fès, Morocco, found herself years later in an apartment in France, waiting for a man who, when she was a child, had been little more than a face she occasionally saw at family gatherings?
How had I gone from that little girl to this woman?
Sometimes, I felt as though my life had been nothing more than a series of decisions.
I had chosen to work.
I had chosen to continue my studies.
I had chosen to become an engineer.
I had chosen to leave Morocco.
I had chosen to stay.
I had chosen Grenoble.
I had chosen to build this life.
And yet, when I looked back, I realized that many of the things I had considered choices had also been circumstances.
Doors that opened.
Doors that closed.
Encounters.
Failures.
Unexpected opportunities.
Detours I had never planned.
And then there was Adam.
Even he had started as nothing more than a distant presence in my life.
I had known of him since childhood.
Our families knew each other.
We had crossed paths several times without really knowing one another.
For years, he had simply been a boy I knew existed.
And yet, somewhere deep inside me, I had always carried a strange feeling.
One day, something will happen.
I never knew why.
I never knew when.
I had no proof.
It was simply an intuition I had never managed to silence.
Then the years passed.
I grew up.
I made my own mistakes.
I met other people.
I fell in love.
I got hurt.
I learned.
I built dreams that sometimes had nothing to do with him.
And yet, when our paths finally began to cross for real, that old feeling came back.
But this time, it wasn’t only in my head.
Adam was standing in front of me.
A real person.
With his own dreams.
His own fears.
His own choices.
And, most importantly, the ability to choose too.
Maybe that was what made this different from everything else.
I could imagine many things.
I could make plans.
I could dream.
But I couldn’t write his story for him.
I could only write mine.
And that was what I had done all my life.
I had written my life through decisions, mistakes, and new beginnings.
I had learned very early how to fight for what I wanted.
At school, I wanted to prove that I was capable.
At university, I wanted to prove that I could succeed.
When I couldn’t afford to leave Morocco, I looked for another way.
When I failed, I tried again.
When one door closed, I searched for another.
Eventually, I left Morocco.
I arrived in France.
I became an engineer.
I found a job.
I got my own apartment.
I built this life.
The life the little girl I once was probably wouldn’t even have dared to dream about.
But there was one thing I had never really learned:
how to let go.
I knew how to fight.
I knew how to work.
I knew how to wait.
I knew how to start over.
But accepting that I couldn’t know what would happen next?
That was much harder.
Adam had left.
And for the next six months, there was nothing I could control.
I couldn’t decide what he would feel.
I couldn’t decide what he would think.
I couldn’t decide what our story would become.
I could only wait.
So I sat down on my couch and closed my eyes.
And for the first time in a long time, I didn’t think about tomorrow.
I thought about before.
Much, much earlier.
I thought about the little girl I had been.
My mother.
Fès.
A time when I knew nothing about everything that was waiting for me.
Before France.
Before Grenoble.
Before my degree.
Before my dreams.
Before Adam.
Before I even knew what love was.
I had to go back to the very beginning.
Because my story hadn’t started with Adam.
It hadn’t started with France.
It hadn’t even started with me.
It had started with a twenty-seven-year-old woman.
A woman who worked in a textile factory in Fès.
A woman who was about to become a mother.
A woman who didn’t yet know how much she would have to fight for her daughter.
And a little girl who knew nothing about the world.
Nothing about poverty.
Nothing about violence.
Nothing about rejection.
Nothing about failure.
Nothing about dreams.
Nothing about love.
Nothing about destiny.
Back then, I was nothing more than a tiny life growing inside my mother’s womb.
I hadn’t chosen anything yet.
I hadn’t asked for anything.
And yet, my life had already begun fighting to exist.
I didn’t know it then.
But that little girl was going to go through far more than she could ever imagine.
And years later, she would find herself sitting in an apartment in Grenoble, staring out at the sky of a French city, wondering whether some things were truly chosen...
or whether they had been written from the very beginning.
That was where it all began.
Long before I could remember.
Long before I could understand.
Before the Beginning.
