The Spaces Between Us

Maeve Carter has always known the streets of Hertford - the narrow lanes, the bookshop by the river, the hum of engines from her father's karting track just outside town. She knows the rhythm of it all: the way sunlight hits the shopfronts, the way the air smells after rain, the way home has a sound all its own.

Oscar Piastri was part of that rhythm once. He lived with her family through the blur of his teenage years - quiet, disciplined, impossible to ignore. He moved through her life like a shadow and a spark all at once: steady where she was bright, still where she was restless.

Now, four years later, he's back. The town hasn't changed, but everything feels different. Maeve is twenty, in her second year studying English Literature at Oxford, caught between the life she's building and the one she never really left behind. And Oscar is twenty-four, carrying a world of speed and silence behind the same unreadable eyes she used to understand so well.

In Hertford, every street, every familiar sound, carries memory. And between Maeve and Oscar, a quiet tension lingers - familiar, heavy, and impossible to ignore.

"Racing through life, bound by words, tethered by memories."