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Chapter 1

I’ve never had one of those huge, life-altering moments before.

You know the ones that are always talked about on TV and in the movies? Those moments that the character looks back on and says that’s when it all changed.

I always envied them; they had experienced something so amazing, so mind-blowing, that their monotonous, everyday lives flipped one-eighty, never to be the same again. Of course, for them, it was always something good. Something fantastic that set them on the path to everything they’d ever dreamed of. They always have a happy ending.

I wanted that.

Sure, I knew it was fiction, but I struggled to see the line between real life and fiction. I’m sixteen now, and I still struggle sometimes. The line blurs and I wander off into my little fantasy land.

Mum calls me her little daydreamer.

My life has always been boring. Boring and predictable. I wake up to the same alarm at the same time every day. Sit around the same table, eat the same breakfast, and have the same conversations with my mum and dad. Then I walk the same route to the same bus stop, before sitting in the same seat for the same twenty-minute ride through east London to school. Every single day.

Until today. Nothing will be the same after today.

Someone is talking to me. I hear their voices, but not their words. My heart is beating too loudly in my ears, and my blood is rushing through my veins like it’s trying to escape. Because that would be easier. To just collapse. To bleed out on the rough, blue carpet of the office. At least that would take the pain away.

I can’t focus on the man sitting behind the desk in front of me, or the police officer at his side, both with their eyes trained on us as we sit on the cold, hard, plastic chairs. Their shapes are just blurred, like ghosts, there but not there, on the very edge of my vision. Instead, I look past them, and out of the window that stands proudly in the background. A portal to another world.

It’s a sunny day, which feels out of place now. The sun shines so unashamedly in the sky as if it’s daring anybody to question its right to be there and to cast such a brightness across everything. Forcing the shadows away.

But it all feels so wrong. I see the sun; I see the shimmer of heat waves in the distance outside of that window... and I feel cold. Icy cold. I long for the shadows. For them to envelop me.

I doubt I’ll ever feel warm again.