My name’s Jamie alright, and she was . . . the cute one from the bar earlier.

  She knew me. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out who she was.

  If she were a relative, even a distant cousin twice removed from some branch of Stella’s chaotic family tree, I’d at least have a vague mental sketch. Stella and Martha had spent my entire childhood making sure ‘family roll-call’ was a yearly ritual, even if I lived on the ass end of the Earth.

  Dating history? Equally short list. Microscopic, really. I could count the girls I’d dated on one hand and still have fingers left for substitutions. And I remembered all of them, mostly because the few I’d dated had left my brain with enough embarrassment to fuel multiple sleepless nights. She wasn’t one of them.

  Or maybe she’d just gotten a wrong Jamie. It seemed like a common enough name.

  Then she said, “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  Her accent hit me. She wasn’t from Lancashire. It got that Hawthorne Vale lilt, the kind you only heard if you’d grown up in The Vale, a little coastal town just north of Newcastle where half the kids played football and the other half pretended they didn’t.

  She was from home.

  Which meant she definitely wasn’t just mixing me up with another Jamie.

  I tried to reconcile the voice with the face. She was standing there, a little off-kilter, hair loosely tied back, dark chestnut with strands escaping like they didn’t care about tidiness and urged you to tuck it behind her ear for her. Her eyes were big enough to make you think she kept a mental tally of every minor annoyance (and had plans for charmingly petty revenge), and her cheeks had the kind of round fullness that would definitely make her look younger than her age and perpetually on the edge of mischief.

  If she was from The Vale and remembered me, odds were I hadn’t done anything catastrophic. I’d never owed anyone money, hadn’t keyed anyone’s car, and my greatest crime back then had been over-hitting passes on muddy Sunday league pitches. If she’d bothered to remember me all the way down here, it couldn’t be from pure hatred. So I did the mature, responsible thing.

  I bullshitted.

  “’Course I remember you,” I said, forcing a grin that I hoped looked less like a grimace. “We go way back.”

  Her face did that processing lag thing, possibly a side effect of getting bullshitted. I kicked it up a notch. “Wow, I just didn’t expect to see anyone from The Vale here, that’s all. Bit of a jump from home, innit?”

  There. Safe and neutral. Confirmed I’d clocked the accent, bought myself a few seconds. If I could get her talking, context would fill in the blanks. School? Youth club? Neighbor? Someone’s little sister who wasn’t so little anymore?

  “If we go way back,” she said, “you want to tell me what nickname you and my brother gave me in Year Seven?”

  Who the fuck asks that question as if I’d just lost my Steam account password? Like ‘what’s your mother’s middle name’? Mate, I barely remember my middle name under social pressure.

  She watched me struggle for another two seconds and gave me a resigned look. “Of course you don’t remember. You never remembered anything. You didn’t even remember to bring the drawings I made of you when you moved.”

  Drawings? Wait, is she—

  “Maisie?” I asked.

  “No. It’s Ellie.”

  “No it isn’t. Ellie didn’t draw.”

  “Oh. So you still remember that about her?” She folded her hands together.

  “Oh, come on,” I said, throwing my hands up. “First time in fifteen years, we’re actually talking, and the very first thing you do is drag Ellie into it?”

  “Not my fault the first thing I remember thinking about you was Ellie’s face.”

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  Maisie Burns, just a year younger, was the little Year Ten kid who could do a perfect caricature of anyone in sixty seconds flat; the same one teachers quietly banned from touching markers because she kept capturing their bald spots too accurately.

  She was also an ex, but that was like, a secondary school thing. What was also a secondary school thing was how pissed she was when she saw me flirting with (and definitely didn’t make out with) Ellie from her class. Yes, it was on me for being ‘friendly’ with literally every girl throwing themselves at me, but what could I say? School was a peak time for me: tall, sporty, smirking way too much, and thinking I could get away with just about anything. I was a bit of an ass when it came to the ladies, and I guess I’d paid back plenty with my woeful love life since the ban.

  Not remembering her wasn’t a shocking thing. The shocking thing here was how she remembered me after fifteen years? And why would she be here?

  I was right about the age, at least. She was probably close to twenty-nine now, but I’d peg her at twenty-five. Not that it mattered much; time had its way with all of us.

  And okay . . . she didn’t look quite as good as I’d remembered, but also I wasn’t exactly glowing the past fifteen years. Aging did this to people. She’d kept it together better than I had, but I wasn’t about to hand her a medal for it.

  And then it hit me. There was a purpose behind the call, wasn’t there? Surely she wasn’t just wandering around, spotting someone familiar for nostalgia’s sake. She looked like a kid in a Poundland, desperately hunting for the last pack of novelty erasers.

  And sure enough, she took a step closer, shifting the weight of her bag like she was about to explain something urgent. “I lost my cousin’s notebook,” she said, “and it looks like it’s, uh, in your hands.”

  I looked down at my hands. She looked down at my hands. Yes, that looked like a notebook alright.

  Wait. Hold on. The footballing agent was her cousin? That explained why she was here, calling out to me like some quest-giver in real life. There was merit to getting to know her.

  And yet, there was a very large but. If this was a stranger, maybe I could’ve conjured the me of ten years ago and slid in a little charm. I could mention I’d played football semi-pro for a bit, casually, and maybe even fish for a contact or two. But this was Year Ten Maisie, the one who’d somehow remembered I broke her teenage heart.

  I held the notebook out, careful not to jostle it. “Well, here you go. Looks like it found its way back to you.”

  She gingerly snatched it. “Thank God—I mean, thank you. I’ve been hunting everywhere. He’ll probably have my head if I don’t get this back to him by tonight. He’s got half a dozen trial meetings lined up.”

  I caught a couple of the pages with a casual glance, letting curiosity do the talking. “So . . . your cousin’s a football agent, then?”

  She nodded, a little wary. “Yeah. He manages a few youth players and keeps an eye on trials. He’s . . . busy.”

  I shrugged, keeping my tone casual. “And . . . do you work in football yourself, or . . .?”

  “Not directly. My agency does a bit of work with local sports teams, organizing events, sponsorships . . . stuff like that.” She hesitated, biting her lip like she realized she was over-explaining. “But I do follow football sometimes. I even caught you on some of the streamed games . . . well, up until you vanished.”

  Up until I vanished. That was loaded. Not quite the ‘he’s a pro’ brag, more like a reminder of that mess I’d made. I forced a small, self-deprecating laugh. “Ah, yeah . . . that. Bit of a rough patch, let’s say.”

  Hold on. That meant she must’ve tracked my games? Nobody who didn’t care about football would tune into a League One fixture and remember the players.

  I stayed quiet for long enough to make the conversation awkward. Asking for a contact now felt too weird, especially how she’d just subtly pointed out my scandal.

  “Well,” she said, brushing her strand of hair back behind her ear, “I know a few scouts and coaches through my cousin, but you’d have to come to one of our events to really see the network.”

  That was it—her opening. Shame or not, I had to take it.

  “Right, yeah. I’d love to hear about that,” I said, trying to keep it casual. “Could you . . . send me a word to your cousin? I can follow up properly.”

  She tilted her head. “Sure, I can do that. But, um—” She dug into her bag, fishing something out. “. . . you’ll need my number to make it easy.”

  I pulled out my phone, fingers fumbling a little as I unlocked it. “Oh. Yeah. Right. Good idea.”

  She leaned back just enough to keep the space between us, gripping the strap of her bag like she was backing away from a small disaster. “If you still have that habit of ghosting people,” she said quietly, “you should save my number too. In case you forget.”

  The weight of the words landed heavier than I expected. This type of carefully veiled edginess was exactly the Maisie I remembered. Nodding, I typed her digits in, hit ‘save,’ swallowing the lump in my throat.

  She slid her phone back into her bag. “Alright. I’ll get back to you by the weekend. Talk to my cousin first, then . . . we’ll see. Thanks again; you’ve been a lifesaver.”

  “Sounds good. Looking forward to it.”

  She shrugged, turned, and started walking away. I watched her go with my hands stuffed in my pockets and my stomach doing its usual dumb acrobatics. Don’t ghost me, don’t ghost me, I muttered under my breath. Please don’t play me back for my dumb teenager mistake. I didn’t even kiss Ellie.