Page 232 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

He shook his head a little. ‘Were you at least happy there?’

She laughed, but a sound without humour. ‘I hated it. I was teased mercilessly in primary school.’

‘What about?’ he demanded with a sense of outrage that softened parts of her she hadn’t known needed it.

‘Promise you won’t laugh?’

He nodded gravely.

‘My name.’

‘Jane?’

‘My name is actually Boudica,’ she muttered. ‘My parents, it turns out, decided to burden me with that, too. It wasn’t enough for me to know I wasn’t wanted, why not throw a truly unusual name into the mix?’

‘I like it,’ he said, and her heart turned over in her chest. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘I hated it.’ She didn’t go into the nicknames. ‘And it was different. Too different for the children at school to understand.’

‘It’s just a name.’

‘You know what kids are like. Once they got it into their heads to tease me about that, and saw they could get a reaction, they found other things.’ She glanced downwards, self-conscious at revealing this to him. ‘Anyway, thank God when I changed schools, they actually moved me back down, closer to London. I didn’t know anyone. It was a proper fresh start. And on the first day, I met my best friend, Lottie, and that changed everything.’ She realised, only after she’d finished talking, that she’d probably revealed way too much. What if he knew his half-sister’s name was Lottie? What if he knew she’d gone to a boarding school on the outskirts of London?

But there was no recognition on his face, only a mix of sympathy and curiosity. ‘How?’

She expelled a shaking breath of relief. ‘Lottie was just like me, in lots of ways. Her own childhood was pretty messed up. She wasn’t super close to her mother or father. We just got each other. But she’s different to me in one vital way.’

‘Oh?’

‘She’s as tough as nails. Lottie’s a fighter. She was just born that way. Or maybe life turned her into one? I don’t know. But all the things that had happened to me and made me kind of timid and nervous had made her angry, determined to change the world. Lottie can’t help but see a problem and want to fix it.’

‘And you were something she wanted to fix?’

‘She would say I didn’t need fixing, that I just needed to understand myself better.’

Zeus’s features shifted with admiration. ‘Smart woman.’

Jane’s chest spasmed. If only heknewthat they were discussing his half-sister! Who was smart, and kind and just generally wonderful!

‘Oh, yes, and my biggest champion. She just had a way of making me see sense.’ Jane moved her hand to his, lacing their fingers together. ‘So, when I started dating Steven, and told Lottie I was in love, she took it with a grain of salt. She understood what I definitely wasn’t able to—that I was looking for the kind of love and acceptance I’d always wanted and never got. My being needy didn’t make Steven any more likely to love nor deserve me.’ Another sigh. ‘I wish I’d listened to her. Lottie would have never trusted a guy like him.’

‘You weren’t to blame,’ he said firmly, as if it was the most important thing in the world that she understands that.

‘I know. But at the same time, Lottie is just so much better at this stuff.’

‘Despite what you think, Jane, you’re trusting. That’s not a weakness. Even after your parents’ neglect, you see the best in people.’

Her lips pulled to the side as she considered that. ‘Why can’t you do that?’

He stared down at her, surprised by her having turned it back on him.

‘You have seen your mother suffer for a long time—it’s impacted you. I do understand that. But why can’t you accept that grief is a part of life, in the same way joy is, and that you can’t have one without the other?’

A muscle jerked low in his jaw; he didn’t answer.

Jane settled back against his chest. ‘Tell me about her,’ she said quietly, because in asking about his mother, she wasn’t asking him to recount his experiences of her illness, or her death, but rather her life. And she listened as he—reluctantly at first, and then more willingly—began to describe her. Her likes, her hobbies, her passions, the food she’d made for him when he came home from school, all of it. At some point, they drifted off to sleep like that, her head on his chest, her mind and heart filled with his words, the spectre of his mother over them, like an angel of destiny.

The next day, the boat moved to a different island, this one smaller and covered in greenery, so they walked a nature path from one side to the other and stopped for lunch at a small, beachfront taverna that served the crispiest, saltiest potatoes Jane had ever eaten. They drank ice-cold beer, then walked back towards the boat, and whatever frustrations Jane had felt the day before, about the parts of himself that Zeus kept walled off, seemed to have ebbed away like the waves in the ocean. Perhaps because hehadstarted to talk to her the night before. Or perhaps because he’d acknowledged his shortcomings and the reasons for them. Or maybe because he’d told her that she was different, special, and she was still, deep down, that same seventeen-year-old, wanting to be loved.