MeliaHall4
She had always said she wouldn't come to Dubai.
She said it like a vow. Like something you could decide at fifteen and then live by forever, the way you decide you'll never touch cigarettes, or never forgive your mother, or never become the kind of person who says manifesting unironically.
"There's no soul there," she used to say, leaning her cheek against cold bus windows on the way to school, watching wet England blur into grey. "It's just glass. It's just money. It's just... men."
And yet, years later, here she is. Thirty thousand feet above a dark stretch of sea, suspended between who she was and who she pretends to be now, letting herself have one passing thought:
Callum would love it here.
Not because he loved heat or fancy coffee or shining buildings - though he did - but because Dubai is the exact shape of the life he's been threatening to build since they were teenagers. Polished. Fast. Untouchable. A life that looks like success from far away.
They were never meant to meet again.
They were never meant to become versions of themselves that no longer fit side by side.
But in a city built on accidents disguised as destiny, they do.
The Way We Lived Then is a quiet, aching story about first love, class, ambition, and the lives that fork apart without asking permission. It is about the person who knew you before your voice changed, before your mistakes had names, before you learned how to edit your past for strangers.
It is about what happens when the boy who wanted everything becomes a man who almost has it - and the girl who wanted escape realises she carried home inside her all along.
And it is about the strange, unbearable grief of discovering that some people only make sense in the version of you that no longer exists.