Chapter 1

The door clicked shut.

Julian pressed me against the wall, his kiss punishing, teeth grazing my lower lip.

"What do you mean, well-matched?"

I blinked up at him, eyes still watering, and caught my breath. "They are, though. Didn't the Cambridge CS Department vote Julian and Celia the most heartbreaking almost-couple last year?"

I could still picture how the post had read.

He's the professor's star protégé.

She's the professor's most beloved daughter.

Co-authored a paper in their undergrad years — accepted by a top conference ahead of schedule. A perfect pairing of brilliance and ambition.

Then someone had dug up a blurry photo from a high school computing competition. Even out of focus, the two of them were breathtakingly good-looking. The comments had piled up into the hundreds, everyone saying they were obsessed with the ship.

I had gone through and downvoted every single comment.

Then I'd basically forced Julian to post a correction under his real name — clarifying that he already had a girlfriend. The dream couple became the heartbreak couple overnight.

Coming back to the present, I realised Julian's next kiss hadn't landed.

He was staring at me, genuinely startled.

"Sophie." His voice was careful. "You used to hate hearing Celia's name. What's going on today?"

I didn't have a good answer.

The truth was simple: I just didn't care anymore.

Nothing much, really.

I just genuinely didn't care anymore.

Julian and I had grown up together — proper childhood sweethearts, the kind with shared garden fences and matching scars from the same tree. The summer after our A-levels, our families had booked a cottage with a private hot spring. While the parents played cards inside, Julian and I started a water fight in the pool.

And then, mid-splash, he leaned in and kissed me.

It was the third year I'd been quietly in love with him. Our friendship had just become something else.

He pulled back, breathless, and said, "Sophie — let's keep this between us for now, yeah? If it doesn't work out, things'll be so awkward for the families."

So we started dating in secret.

Julian's results were flawless. He got into Cambridge. I scraped a decent offer and stayed in Bristol. Long-distance from day one.

Valentine's Day of our third year apart.

I bought a train ticket to London and baked a box of chocolates — planning to surprise him.

That was the first time I met Celia Forsythe.

She was waiting outside the lab, and she stepped in front of me before I could reach the door.

"Hey," she said pleasantly, "I can pass these along for you if you'd like — he doesn't actually like sweet things."

Fortunately, Julian appeared at that moment.

"Sophie. What are you doing here?"

"Girlfriend?" Celia looked me over, then laughed — a quick, teasing sound. "Oh, my bad. I didn't realise."

She added herself to my contacts with the easy confidence of someone who'd never had to introduce herself twice.

"Every year around this time, girls keep showing up to give Julian things," she told me, almost commiseratively. "If I'd known being his unofficial door guard would be this much work, I never would've agreed."

She glanced at me. "You don't look like you're from Cambridge. King's College London?"

I shook my head. When I told her the name of my university, I caught the flash of condescension in her eyes before she smoothed it away.

By the time we made it to the cafeteria, I hadn't smiled at Julian once.

I'd already heard about Celia. She was a friend he'd made at a computing competition in sixth form. For three years, Julian had never once stopped mentioning her — always with warmth, always with that particular lightness in his voice.

"Why didn't you ever tell me Celia was a girl?" I finally asked.

He laughed. "You never asked."

He reached over and lifted the fish from my plate, carefully picking out the bones the way he always did. "What — are you jealous already?"

"I don't like her," I said plainly. "She was rude to me."

"That's just how she is. She doesn't mean anything by it. Once you spend more time with her, you'll see."

He was smiling when he said it.

From that day on, Celia's name lodged itself in my throat like a fish bone I couldn't swallow and couldn't pull out.