Scars. [Harry Styles]

Chapter 1

It was the morning after my twenty-second birthday when the first letter arrived. Max and I were laid in bed, both still knocked out from the previous night's celebratory drinks, when the postman shoved a handful of envelopes through the door. The clattering of the letterbox woke me with a start. I sat up too quickly, and my head began to spin.

“Oh God,” I groaned to myself, holding my head in my hands and trying not to throw up. “Max,” I muttered, nudging my boyfriend with my foot under the covers. “Max, go get the post.” He didn’t stir. He would probably be asleep until the late afternoon. Taking much longer than it should, I peeled the covers back from me and pulled myself to my feet. The floor felt like jelly underneath me, and as I staggered to the bathroom, I realised I still had my birthday dress on.

“Jesus Christ,” I mumbled under my breath as I reached the bathroom and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My hair was stuck up in all different directions and last night’s makeup was smudged down my cheeks. I showered and dressed in some clean pyjamas, brushed my teeth and walked out to the kitchen, closing the bedroom door as quietly as I could behind me.

I thought being twenty-two would feel drastically different to being twenty-one. Twenty-two sounds a lot older, more mature, than twenty-one. It sounds like the kind of age you start getting your life together, sorting out what you’re going to do with it. I had imagined I would feel like a new woman, with goals and plans and a career in mind. But none of that happened, and as I staggered over to the doormat and picked up the envelopes from the floor, I realised that being twenty-two was just going to be exactly like being twenty-one, only now, I had finished university, and would have to go out and find a job.

My degree in chemistry from the University of Leeds had taken me three years to get, and now I had got it, and achieved first class honours, I didn’t really know what to do next. Max made it sound so simple.

“Just go out and get a job,” he had said a few days before. “Now you’ve got your qualification, you just need to get yourself out there, find yourself a nice job, then we can get a bigger place together.” Of course, Max didn’t need to worry about finding work. He had been working at Gio’s Italian restaurant in the city centre since he was sixteen, and with his uncle as the manager, he didn’t need to consider being unemployed for a very long time.

“I don’t know what I want to do, though,” I had replied. “I don’t know if I want to get a job. Maybe I could go back to school, carry on for another year. Do some post-graduate courses.”

“Coralie,” Max had said. “I thought we were supposed to be settling down after you finished school. Building up some savings, buying a house, starting a family. Don’t tell me you want to go back to school and push all of that back?”

Naturally, an argument then broke out, as Max couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to start living in a house and popping out as many children as I could straight away. In truth, I didn’t know what I wanted. I had always lived a quiet life, everything happening when it should in the way it should. I had achieved good grades at school, grown up in a stable family with loving parents and two sisters, who stayed out of trouble just as much as I did. I had met Max when I was eighteen and we had been together ever since, and as much as I loved him, I could never shake the strange feeling that I was missing out on something. My life felt like a long and boring film that you can't ever reach the end of because you fall asleep half way through. All of these thoughts raced through my head as I sat down at the breakfast bar and began to open the mail.

“Junk, junk, bills,” I said to myself as I tossed each letter aside. “Junk, bills, bank statement, ugh, definitely don’t want to read that.” I reached the end of the stack of post, and was about the throw all the discarded paper away when I saw a small, white envelope tucked in between a leaflet about broadband and a heating bill. On the front, my address was written by hand in black ink. I didn’t recognise the handwriting, cursive and slanted to the right, it definitely wasn’t my mother’s, who was the only person I knew who wrote letters by hand any more. There was no name on the front, so I had no way of telling whether it was for me or Max. Regardless, I carefully opened the envelope, took out a piece of neatly folded paper, and began to read.