Just after my fifteenth birthday, which came and went without a fuss from my parents, Callum arrived at school as the new English teacher, Mr Alderton. He had dirty blonde hair flicked to one side, piercing blue eyes and a shaven face revealing smooth flawless skin. All the girls were taken with him immediately, their voices dropping to a whisper when he walked past in his beige cords and slightly crumpled blue shirt. I opted out of their idle grotesque gossip, choosing to take in his beauty without comment. He offered the extra help I needed to pass my exams, I found myself drawn to him in more ways than just the father figure I was missing. I wasn’t interested in English especially, but the world of literature suddenly became a whole lot more interesting with Callum there. But I couldn’t concentrate in class. My thoughts were always somewhere else, usually on my dissatisfactory home life. I had my two close friends, Beth and Aimee. We did lots together, but I never really felt relaxed enough with them to fully open up about who I really was. They saw me as one of the tall, pretty, popular ones like them. But that’s what I was on the outside. Only Callum really saw me, the person I was eager to become and with some nurturing would one day hopefully grow into.

He called me ‘darlin’. His words were like honey warming my insides and I began to experience tingling all over whenever he gazed at me with his blue eyes.

I had stayed behind one day after class. I heard the scuffing and shuffling of the cleaner moving her mop and bucket down the corridor and when we felt we were totally alone, he turned to me and gently pressed his lips on mine, confirming every feeling I had been experienced in those weeks leading up to it.

He was seventeen years older than me, still a young man at thirty-two, finding himself and discovering things about who he was. He told me he felt pressured to be a particular person. He was recently married and they had started trying for a baby.

He told me all of this first, so everything was on the table, I suppose. It didn’t change anything.

Our feelings remained. I was still a virgin and I gave myself to Callum two days later in a hotel room he booked specifically for that reason.

I didn’t feel used, or dirty. It didn’t feel wrong. It was all beautiful. I craved him, I thought about him night and day. We continued our relationship for four months. Four months of pure heaven. I didn’t tell a soul. He was all mine and I was his.

Then everything came crashing down. It was so sudden. I couldn’t have prepared for it.

One day, she was there. His wife: Karen. Small and bony. Her hard and bitter face pressed against the window of his car. She knew where we were. She had been tracing and following us for weeks.