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Nobody particularly wants to be reminded of how they were in their awkward teenage years, especially not when those years were shaped the same way that Delilah’s were.

“Felix told me last night I should ban you from the shop,” she states.

“Generous of him,” I comment, and she smirks at me. I know that was probably the least critical thing that was said about me last night.

She shrugs. “Well, you know Felix.”

Felix and I didn’t know each other too well, but well enough to have made assessments about the other. I knew he loved Delilah like she was the centre of his universe, and I knew he didn’t fully trust me.

I proved him right.

“I thought about you last night during the premiere,” I admit.

“Do you have somebody telling you I should be banned from your life?” she asks, seemingly ignoring my comment. She leans against the counter that divides us.

“I’m sure a few people would have something to say if they knew the details about you,” I tell her, leaning against the counter as well.

A small waft of her perfume comes towards me. She never wore perfume when I knew her—far too much of an expense for her finances—but this scent suits her well. It’s light and reminds me of honeysuckle. I can’t stop the deeper inhale I make, letting the scent envelop me.

“You never told anybody about me?” She sounds curious as she rests her chin on her hand. Her eyes search mine, and I’m intrigued by the confidence she has these days, something she didn’t seem to have when we first met.

“I think my manager and publicist would both have an absolute fit if they knew I was talking to somebody who I used to teach.”

I’m sure that’s not what she means. She wants to know whether I’ve ever told anybody about our history. But that’s way too deep of a topic to get into.

“You don’t talk much in interviews about your time teaching,” she muses, and then her cheeks flush pink.

“Keeping tabs on me, Dee?” I tease.

“I don’t read every article about you. I’m not a glutton for punishment,” she scoffs. She straightens up, pushing herself away from the counter with a frown.

The idea that she considers anything about me as a punishment is disconcerting. In terms of my years on this earth, she’s a small proportion of my life. Seven months out of my thirty-four years. In terms of her impact—that’s immeasurable.

When I decided to teach, I never expected my placement in a school to go the way it did. Allocated in the last few terms of the academic year, I knew I would be teaching students studying their GCSEs and their A levels. I was assigned to one class per year, and for the most part, the students were just kids I tried to get passionate about a subject they’d chosen but had lost the love for. I didn’t blame them. I could tell they were exhausted by their coursework and too focused on getting to the end of the school year, desperate to be finished with their studies and exams. They were mostly a blur of faces—students I learnt the names of but nothing more. I didn’t know anything about them outside of the classroom.

Except for Delilah’s class. They were a small class, so it was easier to get to know them as people rather than just names on the register or grades against their homework. Right from that first day, Delilah was the one who stuck in my head. I tried to tell myself that it was because of the way we met. It was natural to be intrigued by the woman who I found helping herself to food in my kitchen in the early hours of the morning before I then saw her in my classroom. Perfectly normal. I knew it was more than that, though. She had a pull to her, almost magnetic.

The more we spoke, the more she opened up, the more she seemed to burrow under my skin. Little pieces of information about her that she’d share would pinch at my heart and keep me awake at night, lying in bed, unable to sleep, thoughts of her in my head.

“Do you want me to go?” I ask.

She holds my gaze with the new-found confidence she has. As haunting as her eyes are when she stares at me like this, I’m glad she doesn’t seem to be hiding away like she used to.

She mulls my question over for a moment before she bites her lip.

“I don’t know. Does that make me sound awful?”

“No, it makes you seem as unsettled as I am.”

“You’re unsettled?” she asks.

“Yeah. I’ve thought about you a lot over the years—even if I haven’t spoken about you. I’ve wondered how you were and what you were getting up to. Seeing you in the flesh isn’t anything I anticipated, so it’s kind of pulled the rug from under my feet.”

“Thought about me a lot over the years but didn’t go as far as to reach out.” Her tone is slightly accusatory, but her expression is inquisitive.

“I didn’t think you would want me to. You didn’t make it easy for me to, anyway. You fell off the face of the earth. No social media. Changed your number. Closed your email account. You didn’t even live at home.”

I reel off examples of the dead ends I found when I did try to reach out. A long time had passed between the last time I saw her and when I started to look, but I never found a thing about her. Even Felix seemed untraceable on social media, and he was the only friend I knew of hers. Eventually, I gave up the idea of seeking out information about her. I packed it all away in the back of my mind, in the box where I stored all the memories I had of her.