Chapter 5 — Quiet Daydreams

By the time I was seventeen, I had begun, without ever admitting it to a living soul, to imagine a future with Gabriel.

They were not dramatic fantasies.

They were quiet, domestic, comfortable daydreams that would drift through my mind while I did my homework or brushed my hair before bed: Gabriel and me, and Gemma always there too, always part of it, the three of us grown up and living our lives intertwined the way we always had, except that in the daydream Gabriel was mine, and it was the most natural thing in the world.

I never voiced those thoughts aloud, not to my friends, not to my diary, not even fully to myself in the honest light of morning.