Chapter 1
The weather today is atrocious.
Raindrops hit the windscreen violently, exploding against the glass in heavy, chaotic sheets. The wipers are on their fastest setting, slamming back and forth, but they can barely keep up with the deluge. Visibility is almost zero, forcing me to drive painfully slowly, my hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly that my knuckles have turned white.
But the storm outside is nothing compared to the one suffocating my chest.
My heart squeezes, a sharp, familiar ache radiating through my ribs. It has been more than seven months now. Seven months, and it still hurts this badly.
It was a brutal, ugly breakup.
I wasted five whole years on that bastard—five of my absolute prime years, spanning the end of university and the beginning of our working lives.
And for what?
For him to ditch me for someone else as if I meant nothing.
I am twenty-five years old, I remind myself, blinking back the tears blurring my vision. I’m going to be twenty-six in a couple of months.
Being single is fine.
It’s super fine.
I love my independence.
What I hate—what I absolutely loathe—is that I still think about that asshole every single day on my commute to work.
And what I hate even more is that I’m sitting here, crying over him again.
Oh, Jane. Please stop it.
Just stop.
He isn’t worth your tears.
Desperate to chase away the thoughts before I completely lose control, I reach for the car radio and stab at the buttons. I skip past the modern hits and search for something classic.
Michael Jackson.
Beat It floods the car speakers.
I crank the volume up to the absolute maximum. The heavy, iconic guitar riff thumps through the seats, drowning out the roar of rain against the metal roof.
I force myself to sing along, screaming the lyrics at the top of my lungs into the empty car.
“Just beat it, beat it, no one wants to be defeated...”
Slowly, the heavy weight in my throat begins to lift.
My mood shifts.
The music is a shield, pushing the memory of my ex out of my head.
As my breathing settles, my mind wanders back to last night.
I remember opening Instagram before bed.
I keep my account private, but there was a new follow request waiting for me.
A name I hadn’t seen in over a decade.
James.
Just seeing those five letters on my screen caused a strange, unexplained eruption of thoughts in my chest.
James.
He wasn’t the ex who broke my heart.
Long before the university heartbreaks and the toxic adult relationships, James was something else entirely.
He was my very first crush.
The memory hits me like a gentle wave, washing away the grey, rainy highway of 2015.
Suddenly, the smell of the rain shifts, turning into the crisp autumn air of a train platform from a completely different lifetime.
Flashback
In 2004, the world was still wonderfully, terribly analogue.
I didn’t own a mobile phone. My parents deemed fourteen-year-old me too young for one, which meant my tether to the world outside our neighbourhood was a cream-coloured, corded landline sitting on a small table in our family hallway.
If I wanted to hide from the world, I couldn’t bury my face in a glowing screen.
I had to look straight ahead.
He, on the other hand, was seventeen and carried a silver Nokia 3310 like a badge of independence.
We lived in the same neighbourhood and took the same commuter train to school every morning.
Yet we existed in entirely different universes.
I was the “good girl”—a straight-A student who kept her blazer buttoned tightly, her school tie perfectly knotted, and her eyes glued to her textbooks on the platform.
He belonged to the rowdy gang that took over the back carriage of the train—the boys who wore their trousers too baggy, kept their ties pulled down to their collarbones, and laughed a little too loudly.
I knew he existed, of course.
Everyone did.
But I never really noticed him.
I didn’t care to.
Until the third week of the autumn term.
Because of my academic record, I’d been appointed as a junior prefect—a rare honour for a Year 10 student.
It came with a polished silver badge pinned to my lapel and the dreadful responsibility of monitoring the morning assemblies in the Great Hall.
That morning, the hall was a sea of hundreds of students.
The younger years sat in rigid, tight rows on the floor, while the Year 13s—the Upper Sixth students who ruled the school—stood lazily at the back, leaning against the wood-panelled walls.
My duty was to stand at the end of the rows, holding a wooden clipboard, ensuring the younger students remained silent before the Headteacher took the podium.
As the chatter began to die down into a heavy silence, I walked down the centre aisle to check the final row.
My posture was stiff, my mind focused entirely on looking authoritative.
That was when I caught his movement.
He was leaning against the back wall, casually spinning his Nokia phone in one hand while whispering something useless to the boy next to him.
Suddenly, as if sensing a shadow, he stopped spinning the phone.
He looked up.
Our eyes locked across the short distance.
It wasn’t a long look. Just a brief, passing glance.
But the world seemed to violently lose its sound.
For the first time, I didn’t see him as “the trouble from down the street.”
I saw the sharp angle of his jaw, the shaggy hair falling over his forehead, and the intense, unbothered weight of his eyes.
I had just turned fourteen that year.
My body and mind were navigating the confusing, shifting tides of puberty, completely unequipped for the sudden, heavy sensation blooming in my chest.
A fierce, unprompted heat rushed up my neck and flooded my cheeks.
I was completely trapped by his gaze, entirely exposed.
Neither of us said a word.
The silence between us stretched, thick and unreadable.
Panicking at the warmth in my face, I tore my eyes away, staring blindly down at my clipboard and pretending to write down a name that didn’t exist—anything to hide the fact that a boy I barely knew had made me blush for the very first time.
