Tonight, he’d let himself forget.
???
CHAPTER TWO
Mia
Stepping out of the Ashworth corporate headquarters into the late-afternoon light, Mia decided against heading straight underground. Not today. She needed to walk, to let the city press in around her one more time, loud and unconcerned, before it might all slip away.
Rush hour was in full swing. Crowds surged along the pavements—suits loosening ties, smart coats flapping, voices carrying plans for the weekend. Groups peeled off toward glowing pub doors: brass fittings catching the last of the daylight, laughter spilling out with the smell of beer and fried food. Everyone moving toward company, toward the easy release of after-work drinks. Mia walked against the flow, slower than the tide around her, letting people brush past without really seeing her.
The city felt more alive and more distant at the same time: red buses groaning at junctions, black cabs weaving through gaps, the low vibration of trains somewhere below. Every detail—the wet gleam on the kerb, the sudden waft of curry and exhaust—registered sharper tonight. She tried to fix them in her mind, quietly, in case this was goodbye.
By the time she reached her building, the sky had deepened to a bruised purple. She climbed the stairs, unlocked the door to the small flat that held only the faint echo of her own presence. Just quiet, and the soft click of the lock closing her in.
She shrugged off her heavy wool coat and tossed it over the back of the sofa. It landed with a soft thud, still carrying the faint chill of outside.
She switched on the single lamp, dropped her bag, and opened the banking app without sitting.
The balance stared back unchanged: rent scraped together for another month at best, but the flight home—£700, £1,000, £1,300 one-way depending on dates and how many stops she could stomach. Enough to buy the ticket if she had to, but it would leave her with almost nothing. She let the screen go dark.
She moved to the bedroom and opened the wardrobe. A slow, mechanical inventory: jumpers starting to pill at the elbows. Boots bought in a sale her first month here. Notebooks from Oxford—pages filled with annotations on Austen, Woolf, the stories she’d once dreamed of writing herself. The degree certificate she’d framed but never hung properly. And the small, framed photo of her parents on the Amberley porch—smiles too wide, the familiar hills behind them impossibly far.
Oxford had been her everything: the scholarship that turned her love of books and stories into something real, something she could build a life around. She had arrived starry-eyed, ready to lose herself in libraries and late-night words. Then something had broken her there—something dark enough that she’d almost walked away, packed it all in and gone home. But she’d stayed. She had finished the degree, told herself the work mattered more than the pain, that the stories she wanted to tell were worth enduring for. She’d chosen to remain in London afterward, scraping by on part-time jobs and sheer stubbornness, convinced the hard-won qualification would open doors.
And now? If this interview was the end of the line, it all felt for nothing. The years of gritting her teeth through the nights she couldn’t sleep, the decision to stay when every instinctscreamed to run. Wasted. Just another bright girl from a small town who thought she could outrun her own limits.
How would she tell them?
Her mother would try to sound practical—“We’ll make space, love, you can always come home”—but the concern would seep through every pause, laced with the unspoken question of why she hadn’t come back sooner. Her dad would listen in silence, then disappear to the garage or the shed, the way he did when the weight was too much for words. And Amberley: small enough that everyone still remembered the scholarship announcement like it was yesterday. The high-school assembly where they’d cheered her name, the local paper photo under the headline “Amberley’s Literary Star Heads to Oxford.” The proud nods at the dairy, the clubrooms, the butcher’s shop. “Our girl’s going to write the next great novel.” If she returned defeated, tail between her legs, the story would rewrite itself overnight.Such promise… pity it came to nothing.Sympathetic smiles that stung worse than silence, the same faces asking gently how Oxford “really” was, never knowing how close she’d come to breaking.
She sat on the edge of her bed, elbows on knees, staring at the worn floor. She’d been the one who got away, the proof that a bookish kid from the Canterbury plains could chase big dreams and win. What if all she’d proved was how fragile those dreams really were?
Her phone buzzed on the table. Unknown number. Probably nothing. She let it go to voicemail.
Whoever was calling didn’t leave a message and chose to try again. She answered.
“We’d like to offer you the position,” Claire said.
Mia slid down the wall, stunned.
They believed Lucas was a future world champion—but only if the world believed in him too.
And somehow, they believed a scholarship kid from NewZealand could make that happen.
Relief crashed over her in waves, hot and dizzying. She pressed the phone to her forehead, breathing hard. She had it. The job. The lifeline.
And then the image of Lucas flashed back—his sharp eyes narrowing, the way his gaze had dropped for half a second to the soaked fabric clinging to her chest before flicking away. The crackle in the air between them, electric and hostile and something else entirely.
She’d have to work with him. Closely. Daily. Reading him, shaping his story, standing in rooms where that same charge might spark again.
Her stomach twisted.
She wanted this job—needed it—but the thought of facing that intensity every day, of trying to soften edges that cut like glass, left her uneasy. Concern coiled low, mixing with the relief until she couldn’t separate them.
Mia stared at the ceiling long after the call ended, heart racing—not with triumph, but with the knowledge that everything had just changed.
* * *
