CHAPTER ONE
LILY
Edinburgh, Scotland
Cars and black cabs continually moved up and down Leven Street. My gaze wandered from the street to the shops opposite the flat, to the Victorian apartments above them that mirrored the one I stood within. My fingers twitched on the curtains as I attempted to dispel the melancholy hovering over me.
Bruntsfield has been my home for two years. After a year in university accommodation, Madison, my freshman roommate and best friend, and I moved into this flat near the Meadows, a park close to the main campus. We were a quick walk to the library and the Dugald Stewart Building, which housed my psychology classes. The flat was old with a crappy heating system, several broken sash-and-case windows, and a stubborn mice problem. But it was airy and roomy, and it held within it two years of memories. Some extremely happy. Some not so much.
But it was home.
And it was my final year here with Maddie.
A soft object connected with the back of my head, bringing me out of my musings. A sharp glance over my shoulder informed me the object was a cushion and my attacker was Madison.
She grinned unrepentantly from her spot on the sofa next to Sierra. “Hey, daydream believer, I’ve been calling your name.”
I turned, settling against the windowsill. “Sorry. What’s up?”
“It’s our first night back at uni. We need to celebrate,” Sierra, our podcast cohost, piped up in her American accent. She was a full-time international student at the University of Edinburgh, originally from New Hampshire. We’d met in one of my English lit modules in freshman year before I made the switch to psychology. Sierra wanted to work her way up to becoming a developmental editor at a publisher when she moved back to the States.
“Teviot? For old times’ sake,” Madison suggested.
Sierra and I glanced at each other before immediately shooting our friend’s idea down with a cacophony of increasingly emphatic nos.
Maddie raised her hands in surrender. “Jesus, it was only a suggestion.”
Teviot was part of U of E’s student union. It was housed in a beautiful, Gothic-style building on the main campus at Bristo Square. It had a nightclub inside and a couple different bars, including the Library Bar and Teviot Lounge Bar. Sierra and I considered Teviot primarily for freshmen. Also, a wee bit gross. There were much-needed plans in place to redevelop the entire building.
“I guess we’re too cool for Teviot these days,” Maddie continued sardonically in her Geordie accent.
I snorted because I’d never been cool a day in my life. “It’s not that. It’s freshers’ week and it will be teeming with eighteen-year-olds. Let’s go somewhere less freshmany.”
“Somewhere less freshmany requires paying full price,” she reminded us.
“We could go to BrewDog.” Sierra shrugged. “Student discount.”
A twenty-minute walk later, we were in the busy bar on Cowgate, a long way from our first-year uni accommodation. Lucky for us, a table of people were leaving as we came in and we grabbed their booth. The girls strode off to order drinks at the bar while I protected our spot. Indie rock music pumped through the room, loud enough to be heard but low enough you could still have a conversation. In fact, the loud hum of discussion and laughter overpowered the music. Because we’d nabbed the table before a server could clean it, it was sticky and the earthy smell of hops permeated the air.
“You’re doing it. I can feel it,” Maddie said as they returned, sliding a pint of pale ale toward me.
I frowned. “What am I doing?”
“You’re missing this already.” She gestured among us all. “You’re being all sad and mopey when we have an entire year ahead of us.”
Sierra nodded. “Don’t you think I’m the saddest of us all? When I leave, I’m heading back over that great big ocean. Maddie’s heading back to Newcastle, which is only a few hours away, so you guys can see each other whenever you want. I doubtwe’llsee each other more than every other year or so, maybe not even then.”
My heart ached at the thought. “I’m going to miss you. So much.”
“No!” Maddie yelled dramatically, causing heads to turn our way. She made a face at the onlookers and shooed them. “Backto your own business, people.” Turning to us, she narrowed her pretty blue eyes. “We are not doing this. We are not spending our senior year missing one another before we even leave. We’re going to enjoy the shit out of this year and each other.” Maddie raised her glass. “Promise me.”
Sierra and I shared one last melancholy smile before I made a concerted effort to shrug off the sadness. Maddie was right. We knew Maddie would be returning to Newcastle with her MA in architecture to work at her dad’s firm. We knew Sierra would travel back to the States, hopefully to one of the publishers she’d already started querying. But that didn’t mean we should waste the time we had together worrying about our impending separation. I raised my glass, along with Sierra, and we clinked it against Maddie’s with an “I promise.”
By the time we were on our second pints, we were deep in conversation about our plans for our podcastSeek and You Shall Find. We chatted about themes for the upcoming episodes and how we were going to introduce January and her friend Aiysha as the new hosts. Our podcast was primarily a dating advice show where we shared our experiences and dos and don’ts of dating.
My very outgoing and charismatic cousin, Beth, had started the podcast when she was studying at Edinburgh. She’d named it after the university motto because it began as a uni podcast but had grown exponentially in popularity over the years. We’d even won a national podcast award and been interviewed by the BBC and Radio Times. I didn’t seem like the most obvious person to host, but I’d graduated high school with grand plans to push myself out of my comfort zone and so Beth turned the show over to me when she graduated.
Between Sierra’s outgoing, confident, casual dating expertise, Maddie’s perspective from the cool girl monogamist, and my perspective from the introvert attempting to date, thepodcast grew ever more popular under our watch. Beth, who now ran a social media management company, had helped us with the marketing side of things and we’d made some good money from ad sponsorships. Money that had helped toward accommodation and expenses, super useful since we lived in one of the most expensive cities in the country.
