Chapter 1(2)

The walk home was thirty minutes on a good day — longer when the afternoon traffic clogged the intersection at Calloway Bridge and delivery cyclists spilled onto the pavement, weaving between slow-moving cars with insulated bags strapped to their backs and earphones trailing from their collars. Today, Victorare ia did not mind the prospect of the long walk. If anything, she welcomed it. Her mind needed the open air.

The first few minutes took her past the row of shops that lined the stretch just outside the school, a barbershop where two men sat outside on folding chairs debating loudly about the Harwick United match from the previous weekend, and a small diner from which the smell of fried onions and toasted bread drifted out onto the pavement in warm, insistent waves. Victoria's stomach re sponded immediately. She had eaten nothing since the cereal bar she'd had that morning before leaving the house, too anxious for examination day to manage anything more.

She told herself she would eat when she got home.

She pulled out her phone as she walked — a mid-range Android she'd had for two years, its screen cracked at the bottom right corner from a drop. She had four notifications. One was a Mevo message from her mother sent thirty minutes ago: How did it go? Call me when you're out. The message had the small blue double tick that meant her mother had sent it, read her own sent message approximately four times, and was now waiting. One was a low battery warning at seventeen percent. One was a news alert she didn't bother opening. The fourth was a Mevo notification from the Class 3B group — a notification that, when she tapped it, revealed that Evelyn had sent a meme to the group chat approximately nine minutes after the examination ended, followed by eleven laughing reactions from classmates who had clearly all been on their phones the moment they stepped out of the hall.

Victoria stared at the meme for a moment. It was an image of a man sitting at a desk, staring blankly at a piece of paper, with the caption: Me reading the last question and pretending I understand it.

She locked the screen without reacting, which she knew Evelyn would notice and interpret correctly.

She would call her mother when she got home.

At the junction, she waited at the pedestrian crossing alongside a woman with a pushchair and an elderly man in a flat cap who stood with his hands folded behind his back, studying the traffic light with the focused patience of someone who had been waiting at crossings for seventy years and had made a kind of peace with it. The light took longer than usual. A motorbike courier jumped it early, earning a short blast of a horn from a passing saloon car. Nobody on the pavement looked particularly surprised.

Victoria crossed when the signal changed and continued down the road.

This stretch was quieter — residential, lined with terraced houses and low brick garden walls. Some of the walls had wheelie bins pushed against them, others had terracotta pots with plants that had survived the summer and others that had not. 

She passed the corner shop where Mr. Halversen, a broad-shouldered man with a grey beard he kept very neatly trimmed, was restocking the newspaper stand outside. He glanced up as she passed.

"Last day?" he asked.

"Last day," she answered.

He nodded once, the way people nodded when they approved of something without wanting to make a fuss of it, and went back to the newspapers.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She took it out without breaking her stride. It was another Mevo notification — this time a direct message from Evelyn, separate from the group chat.

you didn't react to my meme

Victoria typed back with one thumb: I saw it.

Three dots appeared immediately, which meant Evelyn was already composing a response. Then: that means you related to it and you don't want to admit it

Smiling, Victoria put the phone back in her pocket without replying.

The sky above had been shifting all afternoon. The town of Crestfield sat in a valley between two low ranges of hills. The pale afternoon light had given way to something heavier — a flat, even grey that pressed down from the hilltops and moved steadily across the rooflines. Victoria glanced up at it. She had perhaps fifteen minutes before it became a real problem. She quicken,ed her pace slightly.

Her mind drifted back to the examination. The question on the Caldwell Reforms had caught her off guard at first

She remembered the brief flicker of panic when she turned to that page, the way her thoughts went momentarily blank and unhelpful — but then the reading she had done two nights before, from a supplementary book she had found on the school library's back shelf, came back to her in steady fragments. The political tensions of the 1930s. The failed vote. The compromise that restructured everything afterward. She had written well. She felt certain of it in the quiet, careful way she trusted most.

She thought about Evelyn's meme and felt the familiar mix of amusement and quiet concern that came with knowing a friend too well. She hoped the rest of Evelyn's paper had carried enough weight to balance whatever she had left unanswered.

She turned off the main road onto a narrower street, this one cobbled in the older style that the town council kept promising to repave and never did. The cobblestones were uneven in places, worn smooth in the center and rough at the edges, and Victoria had long since learned exactly where to step to avoid the ones that rocked underfoot. A group of younger kids were further up the street, three of them, taking turns kicking a ball against a garage door with the repetitive dedication that only children and professional athletes ever truly committed to. One of them, a small girl in an oversized hoodie with a football club logo faded beyond identification, paused to watch Victoria pass. Victoria gave a small wave. The girl considered this for a moment and then went back to the ball.

Her phone buzzed again. She did not take it out this time. She already knew it was Evelyn.

Victoria slowed without meaning to.

Three years of this walk. Morning and afternoon, five days a week, through the cold terms when she wore her coat all the way to her chin and the warm terms when the lime trees smelled faintly sweet in the early morning and the long examination term when she walked home with her head so packed with revision that she barely registered the route at all. She had complained about it endlessly — to her mother, to Evelyn, in voice notes on Mevo sent at eleven at night when she was too tired to type properly.

The distance. The cobblestones. The hill on the last stretch that her legs had never fully forgiven.

But standing beneath the lime trees now, with high school behind her and everything else still unformed and ahead, she felt something she had not expected.

She would miss it.

The specific rhythm of this route, the way it moved from the noise of the main road to the quiet of the residential streets, from Calloway Bridge's steady hum of traffic to the cobbled street with its impractical stones, to the smell of whatever Mrs. Hargrove next door was cooking that always reached the pavement before Victoria reached the front door, as reliable and grounding as anything she knew.

These small, unremarkable things that had quietly held the shape of her days together for three years without her ever pausing to be grateful for them.

She was grateful for them now.

She took her phone out one final time before she reached her street. The Mevo notifications had stacked up — four more messages from Evelyn in the direct chat, and fourteen new reactions in the class group, where someone had apparently started a thread about what everyone was doing for the rest of the summer. She read none of them. Instead she opened her mother's message again — How did it go? Call me when you're out — and typed back simply: Coming through the door soon. I'll tell you everything.

She locked the screen and put the phone away.

The first drop of rain landed on her forearm just as she reached her street. Then another on the back of her hand. Then the sky made its decision fully, and the drops became a sudden, steady fall that darkened the pavement in spreading patches and rattled softly against the wheelie bins and the terracotta pots and the lime tree leaves overhead.

Victoria broke into a run, her bag bouncing against her back, her trainers hitting the wet pavement in quick, uneven rhythm. She was laughing by the time she reached her front door — laughing the way she sometimes did when something caught her all at once, not because it was funny exactly, but because there was simply no better response — and she pushed the door open just as the rain came down fully behind her.

She entered the living room.

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