Chapter 7

Julian ended things with Celia.

The morning after Boxing Day, he knocked at my door at an hour that should've been illegal.

We'd kept the relationship secret for years — every holiday, every Christmas, we'd barely been able to be in the same room without worrying someone would notice. Now none of that applied, and Julian seemed to think that meant he could just show up.

So I had no choice but to stand there in a dressing gown, listening.

"I only said I'd be with Celia because I was angry," he told me. "When we got to Sydney, she looked after me — and when she said she wanted to give it a try, I didn't say no. I thought maybe we could make it work. But it was obvious quite quickly that we couldn't. I just didn't know how to end it while we were abroad, because of her father, and everything he'd done for me professionally."

He paused. "I didn't expect her to go after you like that. I'm sorry you got pulled into it."

I was tired of being followed around my own house.

I announced I was joining my father's fishing trip — a polite way of saying please leave.

Dad's old friend's son had been roped in to help, and by a certain inevitable logic, we got talking. He was about to put his number into my phone when Julian appeared from nowhere.

He and the lad recognised each other from school. Julian was apparently something of a local legend — his photo was still on the sixth-form achievement board. They exchanged numbers; I didn't get to.

Julian spent the rest of the day making himself useful: bait, rods, an endless supply of conversation that kept my father entertained well past when he should've gone home. And the next morning, he was back in the kitchen.

Curry. Again.

He had the table set beautifully — rice, greens, a careful dusting of chopped parsley over everything. He put a bowl in front of me and watched, waiting.

The same recipe. The exact same result. And yet something essential was missing — some quality that had made it taste like something.

I set down my spoon.

"Julian." I looked at him. "Getting back together requires feelings. And I don't have any left for you. When I think about what you put me through — I feel ill. Physically."

He was quiet for a long time. His eyes went red at the corners.

"Give me one week," he finally said. "Just one week. Let me show you I've changed. And if you still feel nothing after that — I'll walk away. I won't bother you again."

Julian hadn't actually expected me to agree.

He went home and stayed up half the night planning a week's worth of outings. When he came back to present the itinerary, I told him I only had one afternoon free.

He swallowed his disappointment and smiled. "That's fine. Let's go to the fairground."

Bristol Fairground, on the north side of the city. We used to go there in primary school — a tangle of cheap rides and candy and the smell of fried dough.

"Do you remember — Year Six, the school trip?" He was doing that thing where he looked straight ahead but was talking entirely at me. "Your kite string snapped on a tree branch. You were absolutely gutted. I bought a cotton candy and we split it."

He kept going. The whole journey down, the whole walk to the entrance. A full archaeology of shared memories, each one tenderly exhumed.

Then I suggested we take a photo by the carousel.

"You said you always wanted one here," I told him. "But there were always too many people."

He looked like I'd handed him something fragile and precious.

He barely stopped complimenting my photography technique the whole walk back. I was scrolling through the photos, editing one with half my attention, when I said: "My ex showed me a few tricks. He was good with a camera."

Julian went very still.

"You were with someone else?"

I looked up. "We're adults, Julian. You didn't think I'd just — hold still and wait?"

Three months in São Paulo, actually. A half-Australian student in my evening Portuguese class. We'd ended things amicably when our values didn't quite align, but the time had been genuinely good.

Something moved behind Julian's eyes. He got hold of himself.

"It's fine," he said. "It's like we just had an extended argument. People get… distracted sometimes. That doesn't have to mean anything."

"We can do it again. We've been through worse."

I shook my head.

"Julian. When I went back to you that night in London — I was already preparing to leave. I'd already said yes to the placement. I wanted one last night before I closed that chapter. That's all it was."

I looked at him steadily. "You have a decent face. I used you to de-stress. That's the honest version."

I knew it would hurt. I meant for it to.

He grabbed my hand.

"Sophie." His grip was tight, desperate in the way of someone with nothing left to lose. "Then at least I was useful to you. Before you find someone else — I'll be whatever you need. Just don't—"

"You're already tainted," I said, and pulled my hand away.

"I'm not," Julian said. His voice cracked. "Nothing happened with Celia — I swear it. Nothing. I can prove it."

He was already pulling out his phone with the idea of booking an STI clinic.

I had a brief, surreal image of being physically dragged there and stood my ground.

I took his hand away from my arm.

"Whether anything happened with her doesn't matter to me anymore," I said. "It's like that curry — same recipe, same ingredients. But it doesn't taste the way it used to. We can't go back."

He went quiet.

When he spoke again, his voice had collapsed into something small: "But how? We were so close. How did we end up here?"

I told him.

"Because you got comfortable," I said. "You took my love for granted and kept raising the bar for what you needed. You wanted a perfect girlfriend, but you never checked whether you were being a decent boyfriend. You let the lines blur with other people — it was always just friendly, never an issue, never worth discussing — and then when I reacted, you made it my fault. You turned me into someone anxious and suspicious and then held that anxiety against me."

I watched his face.

"For a while, I almost believed it. Maybe I was too sensitive. Maybe I was the problem. And then I left, and everything got better. I met someone who didn't make me feel like I was constantly failing a test I didn't know I was taking. That's when I understood: it was never me."

Julian's tears came slowly, then all at once.

He pressed a hand over his face. The sound that came out was something desperate and jagged — the sound of someone who'd finally reached the wall they'd been building toward for years.

"I know," he said. "You're right. I got comfortable. I took you for granted. I was wrong. I'm sorry."

He reached for my hand — then redirected and struck himself across the face. Hard.

"Hit me," he said. "It'll make us both feel better."

I pulled my hand away from him.

"The week's up," I said.

He stilled.

I looked at him, and let him look back.

"Keep your word, Julian. Don't come after me again."

A few days later, Celia went to her father.

She threatened to harm herself unless Professor Forsythe made Julian fail his supervised research module. The professor complied.

Julian retaliated. He filed a formal misconduct complaint with the university, alleging that Celia's postgraduate application — the thesis that had secured her PhD placement — had been built on research data she'd taken from him without credit.

The investigation ran to the end of term. The university, needing to be seen to act, came down on both sides: Professor Forsythe was suspended. Celia's postgraduate place was revoked and the misconduct ruling went permanently on her academic record. Julian, for his part, had to retake the failed module — which pushed back his graduation date and complicated a job offer he'd already accepted.

I found out while I was somewhere over the Atlantic, on my way to the Maldives with my parents.

My phone was in flight mode. I'd accidentally opened my camera roll, and there it was: the photos from the fairground. Julian's profile, half in frame. The carousel.

I selected every one of them. Deleted.

His mess was his own. But everything that had fallen on him — Celia's academic fraud exposed, Forsythe gone, his own delays — none of that had happened by accident. He'd handed the people around him the tools to do it.

I called it interest on a long-outstanding debt.

I fell asleep somewhere over the ocean and dreamed.

In the dream, I was watching from somewhere above it all — a high school corridor, golden afternoon, the smell of cut grass. Julian had just finished a football match. He jogged over to where I was sitting under a tree with a book, tilted his head back and drank half a water bottle in one go, drops sliding down his jaw.

He looked over at me with that look he'd had at seventeen — all restless wanting and nowhere for it to go.

His throat moved.

"Sophie," he said. "What do you think we'll be like in ten years?"

I looked up at him.

"Strangers," I said.

— End —