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Juniper didn’t have time to be heartbroken, or at least so she told herself. She ignored the hollowness that followed her around campus that day, desperate to get her contest piece done. She had two weeks left, not nearly enough, but she would do it. She would have to.

That was why she stayed in the workshop after class that afternoon, throwing like her life depended on it. Blisters were beginning to form on her fingertips, but she refused to stop.

‘Juniper?’ Tilly seemed to appear out of nowhere, standing uncertainly on the other side of Juniper’s desk.

Juniper looked up just long enough to acknowledge her. She didn’t want to talk about it. If she talked about it, she would have to feel it properly, and she was sick of feeling things. Especially for Aiden.

‘Babe, you’re crying. Stop.’ Tilly nudged her gently away from the wheel, bending down so that Juniper was forced to look at her. She hadn’t known she was crying, and wiped her cheeks with her clay-covered sleeve quickly. ‘What the hell’s going on? You weren’t in class this morning, and now you’re lining up a table of wonky vases.’

She glanced behind Juniper at the creations she’d made so far. Not one of them had turned out as intended. Some of them curved in because Juniper had tried to smash the clay in anger, others had almost been thrown across the classroom. Nothing she did was right, too much focus going into the memory of Aiden’s hands on hers, guiding her, the first time she’d made something she was truly proud of.

‘I just need to get things ready for the contest,’ Juniper said. ‘I need six pieces and I have none.’

‘You need to tell me what’s wrong. Has something happened? Is it your funding?’ Tilly took Juniper’s sore hands, urging her onto the floor so they were on the same level. Juniper let her only because she didn’t feel the least bit in control of herself, the cold linoleum a welcome reprieve after hours hunched over the wheel.

She brought her knees to her chest, nails digging into her thighs in an effort to hold herself together. ‘Aiden,’ was about all she could choke out.

‘Oh, shite,’ Tilly whispered. ‘What’s the plonker done now?’

Juniper told her, the story pouring out in fragments: him getting her an interview, visiting his dad, how it all linked back to Elmington. How, just when she’d fallen for him completely, he’d reminded her of all the reasons why she hated him.

‘Except you don’t hate him, do you?’

Juniper glowered at her. ‘I do now.’

She hated how clueless he was, how ignorant. She hated how he said her name like it was the only one that mattered. She hated how he touched her in places she’d never even paid attention to before, places where she couldn’t scrub the ghost of him away,and how his light snores had sent her into a soundless sleep last night. She hated that he just didn’t get it. That he never would.

She hated that she’d let him in knowing all of this, and now it had blown up in her face – just as she’d always predicted.

‘I shouldn’t even care.’ She sniffled. ‘I should be focusing on the competition, but I can’t even do that right!’

‘Heartbreak can be inconvenient that way.’ Tilly wrapped an arm around Juniper’s shoulder and tugged her close, resting her cheek against Juniper’s head. ‘I completely understand why you’re upset. He went behind your back, took your problems into his hands, and that was really fecking shitty.’

‘If you saybut, there will be consequences.’

‘But,’ Tilly continued, ‘he thought he was doing the best thing for you, and you deserve someone who cares for you that way. It’s okay to be supported, Juni, financially and otherwise. Judging how sour he was on the train home yesterday, it wasn’t easy for him, either. He didn’t just call Daddy and ask him to fix everything, did he? He probably had to put a lot of pride and self-preservation aside to ask for his help.’

Juniper bit down on her wobbling lower lip, thinking of how upset Aiden had been yesterday. He’d subjected himself to his dad for her, faced his own pain to heal hers.

And he hadn’t known about Elmington. She’d suspected it before, when it had never come up in conversation even after he’d spilled his struggles with his health, but today had confirmed it. The shock on his face, the way his voice had broken, the way he’d reacted to all of her insults like they’d been physical blows.She’d been so angry that the rest was a blur, but she couldn’t scrub the image of him in that moment. The pain she’d caused.

‘I told you there would be consequences,’ she said, and then sobbed until her stomach ached.

Tilly soothed her with a gentle hand through her hair, the two of them crumpled in an empty workshop, surrounded by things that used to make Juniper feel alive but now only seemed to hurt her. A longing to go home hit her, but it wasn’t an image of Manchester that accompanied it. It was Aiden’s house, with Cerberus in his cage nearby and paints scattered over the coffee table. And him, settling on a part of her, any part of her, to trace shapes in her skin with his feather-light fingers, a hint of pencil shadow or acrylic under his nails.

‘I don’t even know how I’m going to get my hamster back!’ she realised. ‘I have nowhere to put him!’

‘Now, hear me out, Juniper,’ Tilly said. ‘What if, right now, we just focus on you, and not the happy wee hamster napping obliviously in his cage in a flat where he’s clearly cared for?’

She had a point. Juniper might not have trusted Aiden with her heart, but she trusted him with Cerberus. Still, she couldn’t just let him live there forever.

‘What am I going to do, Tilly?’ she asked.

Tilly wiped Juniper’s tears with soft hands and straightened up assertively. ‘You’re going to get this contest out of the way. You’re going to win it. And then, you’re going to talk to Aiden like an adult because you clearly love him, and he clearly loves you.’

‘If he did, he won’t anymore.’ Not after all the things she’d said. And besides, how could they come back from this? How couldshe? They just weren’t compatible. It had barely been a few months, and they’d exploded.

They weren’t right for each other. They never had been and never would be. The best thing Juniper could do was accept it and move on.