Enemies to Lovers

Chapter 1

1

I am floating. I am floating on the crystal-clear water of whatever ocean laps around the sandy Greek shores of Preveza. Is it the Aegean Sea? Hmmm. I should probably know that. I’ll google it when I’m back near my phone. Obviously I don’t have my phone in the water. It’s just me and presumably some fish, early-afternoon sun bringing my skin – and if I wouldn’t get laughed at by my ridiculous family for poetic hyperbole, I’d go as far to say my very soul – back to life after three long years under grey Scottish skies. Actually, that’s not strictly true. The university is under grey Scottish skies, and so for the most part I’ve been under strip lighting. Either way, this is the first time I’ve felt any semblance of hope, or freedom, or possibility , in ages. I once read that we’re all solar-powered. I get that, now. It’s like when the sun is out and the water glistens, everything that came before melts away. So much doesn’t matter here, unmoored, bobbing about, the sound of my own heart surprisingly good company. Even last Christmas and everything that happened feels far away, and after my breakdown I didn’t think anything could be any worse than that. Only I could hit rock-bottom and then discover it has a basement. Classic.

Recovery can mean different things for different people. That’s what my therapist says. Having a breakdown at twenty-four is part of who I am and, two years on, it’s part of what’s made me the resilient, hopeful phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes that gets to float in the sea and let her mind drift, happy to be alive. I was a wreck, back then. A year into my PhD and I had a depression and anxiety that got worse and worse until I was signed off sick from my course and had to spend a month in a residential care facility. Even after I left, I had to have daily visits from the crisis team – but that’s when I met my therapist, and she’s changed my life. Well, I have changed my life actually, but she gave me the tools to do it. I’ve done a lot of work to get better. I had to stop fighting myself. I’ve journalled, medicated, walked, stretched, got back into running. I’ve made best friends with Hope, which isn’t a joke: literally, the woman I saw waiting outside my therapist’s office three times a week is called Hope. It’s not a metaphor. In fact I called her Despair for a while, as we got to know each other. It made her laugh. But after Jamie slipped that note under my door at Christmas, it tested my new tools to the limit. I was so humiliated. I’d gone home for the holidays feeling so in balance, and suddenly there he was – my brother’s best friend joining us for the festivities – and the vibe between us had shifted. I was open to it.

‘Am I imagining this?’ he’d asked, after days of … something.

‘No,’ I’d said. ‘Knock on my door later,’ I eventually told him, after a family movie night where his foot ended up pressed against mine under the blanket and the nearness of him almost made me explode.

He never showed. His letter said he’d bottled it. I’d put myself out there and … well, it’s a good job I’d had all that therapy, because I needed every trick in the book to pull myself back together. Yeah, it was only a few days of whatever-it-was developing between us, but all my ‘positive thinking’ and ‘soothing visualisations’ had me thinking I’d actually get to have a bit of fun for once. Because, spoiler alert: nobody wants to date the woman who had a nervous breakdown. I had thought Jamie ‘got it’, what with his own trauma. I thought he understood me. So that’s what hit hardest. I know now that I should never have trusted him, because first impressions are nearly always right: he really is a vapid womaniser, and I will never fall for his charms again because I have worked too damned hard for my self-respect.

I’ve not seen him since then. We’ve avoided each other. Which is why it pisses me off so much when, standing up, with the seabed squashing sand between my toes, the sun forcing me to squint, I notice a stranger up on the beach who looks exactly like him. There’s Mum and Dad and my two brothers, Alex and Laurie, and there’s Laurie’s wife Kate, too. We got in an hour ago, the owners of the villa having kindly packed us a picnic basket for an early supper, which we schlepped down here, along with some beach chairs and our towels. Just the six of us. Except … I’m here, so that should be five bodies up there on the sand.

I lower my body back into the warmth of the sea and swim as close to the shore as possible, staying submerged so I can surreptitiously dislodge a wedgie. I turn to look again, now I’m closer. It’s then that I realise the sixth person up there with my family definitely isn’t a passing local or a figment of my imagination.

It is Jamie.

And I am suddenly absolutely furious.