And even though I'm standing in the middle of the biggest crowd I've ever seen in my life, I suddenly feel very alone.

She liked that word: we. It sounded warm and open, like a hug.

It's as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.

It's amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.

Until, one day, she wasn’t.

The worst is knowing I can't tell anybody what's happening -or what's happened- to me. Not even my mom.

My heart shoots into my throat every time I think I see his loping walk, or catch sight of some floppy brown hair on a boy - but it's never him, and each time it isn't, my heart does a reverse trajectory down into the very pit of my stomach.