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Or maybe she should never have come here at all, just like her mum had said.

With a final sob, Juniper tossed the crate of broken pottery away, and then kicked it for good measure. Whatever love she’d felt for her craft was gone, and all she could do was lower to the ground and wonder why she would never be enough.

37

As Aiden entered the workshop, he faltered at the crunch beneath the soles of his trainers. He looked down and immediately began to panic. Somebody had dropped their intricately hand-painted porcelain, and now he was stepping all over it.

He hopped off quickly, bending down to try to salvage what he could. Who had left it here? Were they coming back for it? How much damage had been there already?

This was the last thing he’d needed after his shitty week. He’d come in here to have some alone time, a place to find his inspiration again after staring at blank canvases and untouched clay for hours on end. He was supposed to be working on his portfolio, but so far, he had nothing. Nothing to say, nothing to convey. It had been that way since the minute Juniper had left him, like she’d taken all of his ideas with her. All ofhimwith her.

‘Don’t pick it up. Leave it.’ A barely-there voice rasped from somewhere nearby, all too familiar, and his stomach tugged in response. Juniper, hiding from him again, only this time, it wasn’t so obvious where.

Not until he treaded slowly around Chris’s desk and found her underneath, her back pressed against the wall, one knee to her chest while she stared lifelessly at a ladder in her work leggings. Pink blotches smattered her face as though she’d been crying for a while, though her cheeks were dry now.

The anxiety he’d been trying to push down all week forced its way out at the sight. ‘Juniper… What happened? Are you okay?’

She looked at him as though surprised to see him. ‘Of course it’s you.’

‘Of course it’s me,’’ he repeated, gentle, because didn’t it always seem like something was pulling them together? A love for the same thing, or their own raw chemistry, or maybe something else, but she was always there, wherever he went. And he would always be there for her, even if she didn’t want him to be. ‘Tell me what happened, sweetheart.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does. It matters a lot.’ He knelt, unable to keep from placing a hand on her bent knee. She gazed at it like it didn’t make sense for it to be there, and maybe it didn’t, but he had to do something, show her some way, that he was here. ‘If you don’t want to talk to me, I can call Tilly.’

‘No,’ she croaked. ‘No. She’s working.’

‘Then Luc, or your parents, anyone.’

She closed her eyes, tears spilling over, and he could do nothing but hold his breath and try not to stop them. ‘My parents have been waiting for this to happen.’

‘For what to happen?’

‘For me to fuck everything up, like I always do.’

‘You dropped a few pots. We can fix them. Make some more.’

A shake of her head. ‘I didn’t drop them. I threw them. Because they were shitty and boring, and half of them didn’t survive the kiln.’

He eyed them. They didn’t look shitty or boring to him. He’d assumed they’d been made by a third-year student; Chris had barely scratched the surface of some of the glazing techniques used, not to mention that they’d worked with porcelain, a delicate material Aiden had tried to stay clear of whenever he could help it.

He reached for the nearest piece, a cylinder with a hole in the centre which he assumed had been a spout. The blue patterning around the lip was as intricate as that he’d seen in Middleport, barely a wobble in the paintwork. Something most potters would kill to achieve. How did she still not see her own talent?

There was no way it deserved to stay in pieces. He picked up as many of the bigger parts as he could, careful not to scrape his palms on the rough edges.

‘I told you to leave it,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll throw them away. You don’t have to clean up all my fucking messes, Aiden.’

‘I’m not cleaning up,’ he said. ‘I’m recycling.’

She sighed. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘In places like Japan, repair is part of a pot’s life cycle. You can piece things back together with gold or silver, make the cracks part of its beauty. Or you can replace the missing pieces with different ceramics and materials. This isn’t a mess. This is just one step in the process.’

‘Is this some terrible, cheesy metaphor about how beautiful pain can be and how all heartbreaks can be healed, and all that other toxic positivity nonsense?’

‘I wasn’t talking about hearts. I was talking about pottery.’ He lifted a brow, unable to keep from smirking. ‘But if the shoe fits.’

‘It doesn’t,’ she snapped. ‘My heart is fine.’