All Chapters of The love I'd promised myself to find : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Rhona learned pretty early that love was not always a beautiful thing. Most times, love was a woman sitting alone at the edge of her bed at 2am, trying not to cry from the pain of it because her children were sleeping in the other room. Several times, it was a man packing his belongings and leaving for days without turning back. And lastly, sometimes it was a girl standing in the middle of a house, wondering why the people she called her parents , who had promised themselves to love each other forever, suddenly could not stand being in the same room. Most times, she saw her father raise his voice until it turned into something worse during heated arguments with her mother. And most times, after those arguments, he would disappear into the other apartment. They lived in a big compound with two buildings facing each other like they were arguing too. Her mother and her children including Rhona stayed in one. Her father lived in the other, with his other children and some of their moth

By the second week of classes, Rhona had a routine.She got to Class ten minutes early, always sat in the same spot in the back row, and always had her coffee from the café where the barista called her “Queen. “Priya called it “aggressively type-A behavior for someone who claims she doesn’t like mornings,” and Rhona told her that consistency wasn’t the same thing as liking something.“It’s called discipline,” Rhona said, sliding into her seat one morning while Priya trailed in behind her, visibly less awake.It’s also called “you’re scared of being late and it manifesting as showing up an hour early.”“Ten minutes.”“An hour, emotionally.”Rhona rolled her eyes, but she was smiling when she opened her notebook.“Okay, don’t look now,” Priya said one morning, not lowering her voice nearly as much as the words suggested she should, “but the guy three seats over has been staring at you again.”“Priya.”“I said don’t look.”“You said it in a way that guarantees I’m going to look.”Rhona d

ADRIAN’S POV Adrian Cole had a problem he couldn’t solve, and it was sitting three seats over in a back row of Contracts.He’d noticed her the first day of classes — actually, he’d noticed her before that, at some point during orientation when he’d walked past a circle of students and caught her laughing at something someone had said, the kind of laugh that seemed to come from somewhere genuine instead of the practiced social performance most people defaulted to. He’d kept walking, hadn’t thought much of it at the time.Then she showed up in his lecture hall, and suddenly not thinking about her became significantly harder.The staring wasn’t intentional at first. It was just — she sat there, took notes like she was having a conversation with her own handwriting, asked sharp questions that made the professor pause before answering. She had this way of tucking her hair behind her ear when she was concentrating that made it hard to look anywhere else once he'd noticed it.After about a

Rhona spent two days working up the courage to do what Priya had suggested.Two days of sitting in Contracts, thinking about how to make it not obvious that she was looking for a reason to talk to him. Two days of Priya texting her things like "just ask him already" and "you're overthinking this" and "he literally answered your last question, he's not going to bite."By Wednesday afternoon, she'd decided that if she didn't do it today, she wasn't going to do it at all. And she was tired of not doing it.She found him in the library around 3 PM, sitting at one of the study tables with his laptop open and a stack of case files beside him. He looked focused, in his own world, the kind of concentration that made her think about interrupting him feel like a big deal.She walked over anyway."Hey," she said, and then immediately felt stupid because "hey" was the laziest way to start a conversation.He looked up, and something in his expression shifted when he realized it was her. Not a bad

They met at a coffee shop near campus, somewhere calm that wasn't the library or school grounds. It was a Saturday afternoon, and Rhona had spent the morning changing her outfit three times before settling on something that looked casual but also like she'd put thought into it.She told herself it was just because she wanted to look normal. Not because she was meeting Adrian,He was already there when she arrived, sitting at a corner table with two cups of iced americano. He looked tired, like he hadn't slept much. When he saw her, he stood up, and she realized she'd forgotten how tall he actually was."Hey," he said. "Thanks for coming.""Yeah."She sat across from him, and there was this awkward moment where neither of them knew where to start."I got you iced coffee," he said, pushing one of the cups toward her. "I wasn't sure how you take it, so I just got it with extra ice and a little sugar. If that's wrong, we can—""It's fine," she said, interrupting him. "Thank you."He nodde