In the Shallows by Tanya Byrne

Author:Tanya Byrne [Byrne, Tanya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Young Adult, Mystery, Romance
ISBN: 9781250865588
Amazon: B09Y465NKM
Goodreads: 99310462
Publisher: Hodder Children's Books
Published: 2024-02-28T22:00:00+00:00

‘You didn’t tell her?’ Michelle said when I got home to find her rooting through my room, looking for her favourite lip gloss. She was meeting Lewis and was flustered and late, so I probably shouldn’t have told her that I’d seen Nico again. But I had to, otherwise I would have spiralled on my bedroom floor until she got home.

‘I know,’ I groaned.

‘You told her about Vas’s punk band but you didn’t tell her you used to be together?’

I covered my face with my hands and groaned again. ‘I know.’

‘I can’t believe this,’ Michelle said, and she sounded so genuinely confounded that I took my hands away from my face to find her shaking her head. ‘I mean, you haven’t seen Nico for four and a half months , then you see her twice in two weeks. What are the chances?’

‘Right?’ I slapped her arm. ‘That has to mean something, doesn’t it?’

She slapped me back. ‘Don’t.’

‘Don’t what?’

‘Overthink this. It’s just a coincidence, Mara.’

I huffed because she was probably right, but sometimes it’s fate, right?

Why couldn’t it be fate this time?

Perhaps the only difference between coincidence and fate is your desire for it to be one, not the other.

‘What are you going to do?’ Michelle asked, and I remember that she looked more concerned than thrilled.

Not that I expected her to be thrilled. After all, it was Nico, so Michelle – or I, let’s be real – had no reason to believe that things would be any different this time. That Nico had emerged from the sea the perfect girlfriend. But just this once, I wished that she wasn’t so meticulously, immovably logical. Especially about those magical, movable things that have no regard for logic. Things like fate and luck and that other four-letter word I didn’t dare say out loud.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, reaching for one of my pillows and hugging it.

‘Are you going to see her again?’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’

‘So you swapped numbers?’

‘We’re going for coffee again tomorrow.’

She arched an eyebrow at me. ‘And whose idea was that?’

‘Hers,’ I told her with a smug smirk.

But when Michelle’s gaze drifted over my shoulder to the window behind me, my heart clenched like a fist. It was the look she gets when she’s trying to solve a particularly demanding algebra equation, her forehead suddenly so tight that I wanted to tell her to relax because she’d give herself a headache. But I couldn’t because I knew what she was doing. She was trying to find a way to say what she wanted to say, but she didn’t know how and that made my chest feel even tighter because Michelle always knew what to say.

Always.

Finally, she nodded to herself, then looked me in the eye.

‘Mara, you have to be careful. Nico isn’t the same person you knew before.’

Usually, I’d have a well-rehearsed defence ready to reassure her that I was fine – that I wasn’t going to get hurt – even though we both knew that wasn’t true. But I couldn’t argue with that, could I? Nico wasn’t the same person.

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