The Knock We Used To Share

Chapter 2: The Knock We Used to Share

The rain had gone from a downpour to a steady, freezing drizzle by the time I left Crestview Arena. My phone had twelve percent left, but I didn't need directions. I knew the address by heart: a block of flats in Salford, paid for by the advance his agent had secured three months ago.

I took the night bus across Manchester, my clothes stuck to my skin. Every passenger who glanced my way felt like a needle.

The clip was already everywhere, and I caught bits of it behind muted phone screens. Is that her? The flower girl?

When I reached the building, the glass doors were locked, but a group of students let me slip in behind them. I rode the lift to the sixth floor, my boots leaving wet prints on the carpet.

Outside door 604, I didn't knock like a stranger. I knocked the way we used to knock on the fence between our gardens in Birmingham. Three quick taps, two slow ones. A code we made up when we were nine, so we'd always know it was each other.

The door opened. James stood there in a fresh grey hoodie, a towel round his neck. When he saw me, whatever was left of the boy who used to share my lunches vanished from his face.

"How did you even get up here, Aima?" his voice was low, dangerous. "Are you out of your mind?"

"James, please." I stepped forward before he could shut the door. "Why did you do that? On live TV? You looked at me like you'd never seen me before in your life."

"Because I don't know this version of you." He grabbed my arm and pushed me back into the hallway. "You crashed a national broadcast looking like that. Do you have any idea what's riding on tonight for me?"

"What's riding on it for you?" The tears I'd been holding finally came, hot against my frozen face. "I sold the house, James. My parents' house. I sold Mum's salon after the crash. Every penny they left me went on your trainers, your camps, your physio. I told you on the phone that Bridget threw me out. I told you I had nothing left."

He laughed, short and hard, and folded his arms. "And what was I supposed to do about that? Be your saviour?"

"I expected you to remember your promise." My voice cracked in half. "You said we were in this together."

"That was when we were children." His tone went cold, the kind of cold I'd never heard from him before. "Wake up, Aima. You're the daughter of a secondary school teacher and a hairdresser from Birmingham. You've got no status, no money, and no future. What did you think was going to happen?"

The words landed harder than a slap. I actually stumbled back, like he'd knocked the air out of me.

"I have nothing," I whispered, "because I gave it all to you."

"That was your choice." Not a flicker of shame on his face. "I'm about to sign a professional contract worth more than your entire life. Scouts are in the stands.

Sponsors are watching. I can't be tied to a girl who brings nothing but poverty and a sob story. I need someone who lifts my profile. Someone like—"

"Someone like me," said a voice behind him.

Jemima appeared in the doorway in a silk robe, holding a glass of sparkling water.

Her eyes moved over my wet hair, my old coat, my muddy trainers, with a look that was somewhere between amused and sorry for me.

"James, darling, please tell me she isn't going to stand in the corridor all night," she said, her voice smooth as anything. "The neighbours will complain. And I can smell the damp from here."

"She's leaving," James said, and stepped back inside.

"James, wait." I grabbed the doorframe. My knuckles went white. "I have nowhere to go. I've got forty pounds to my name."

"Then go back to Bristol." He looked down at my hand on his door like it disgusted him. "Or sleep on the street. I don't care which. Just stay away from my cameras, my team, and my life."

He didn't just close the door. He slammed it, hard enough that I felt the shake of it through the floor under my feet. The lock clicked shut, one sharp little sound, and that was it. That was the whole thing, over, in one click.

I stood in the hallway and shook. Not from the cold. From something underneath the cold.

I don't remember the stairs. I don't remember stepping back out into the rain. The next thing I properly remember is sitting on a wet wooden bench at the bus stop down the road, shaking too hard to hold my phone.

The memories came at me one after another, like they'd been waiting.

I remembered sitting in the solicitor's office after the crash, numb with grief, signing over the rights to my parents' semi-detached house. I remembered handing over the keys to Mum's salon, telling myself she would have wanted this, that James was our future, that this was what love looked like when it had to grow up fast.

I remembered my dad's funeral. Rain, just like tonight. James holding my hand so tight it hurt, swearing he would never let me be alone.

I remembered the floor of Aunt Bridget's spare room, the thin mattress, the things she called me when Uncle Samuel wasn't home, the theft I never committed. And every night I told myself it was fine, it was temporary, because James was going to make it, and when he made it, he was going to come back for me.

I pulled my knees up to my chest and put my face into my wet coat and cried until my throat felt raw.

Every single sacrifice, built on a promise that had an expiry date I never knew about. I had taken apart my own life, brick by brick, to build his, and he had walked straight over my hands to get to the top of it. My kindness hadn't saved him. It had just fed something in him that was always going to need more than I had.

And now I had forty pounds, a broken heart, and a city that had already decided I was a joke, all because the boy I built had used my whole life as his ladder and kicked it away the second he didn't need the rungs any more.

A bus pulled up, headlights cutting through the rain. I didn't have anywhere it could take me. I just sat there and watched it go, and thought, for the first time since I was sixteen years old, that I was completely and entirely on my own.

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