And so it goes on. Every week another girl catches her eye and before the week is over, she’s on to someone else. Attuned to their every movement and ensnared by every word they say.

Nobody ever has to tell Connie that she ought to keep these thoughts, these feelings, a secret. She wouldn’t dare ever speak them aloud. She knows, as soon as she’s old enough to piece it all together, that the thoughts she has just aren’t going to fly with anyone. Not with her friends, not with her classmates—not with her family. Connie knows as soon as she is old enough to understand, boys, girls, love, sex, that she doesn’t feel the way anyone else in Halford does. That the things she wants, she just shouldn’t want. That the person she is, she just shouldn’t be. And it’s something she locks away and buries deep down in the crevices of her brain, out of sight and out of mind. It’s trivial. It’s inconsequential. It’s irrelevant.

Connie has the foresight to picture her future rather clearly, and all these silly fantasies she has, of soft lips and gentle touches and feminine curves—they’re not a part of it. ‘Stability and security’, as her father says. That’s what she imagines for herself. What she wants right now is a delusion, a distraction. What she wants and what she is meant for are two perpendicular paths that will never meet and, if she’s being honest, that doesn’t faze her as it should. Sacrificing the things she loves is nothing new. She accepts very early on that the cravings of her heart are a vice she’ll never give in to, and while she may not be the best at school or studying Connie is smart enough to know and understand the things that truly matter.

Connie knows she is gay. She has known it right from the start, right from the moment she first learned what gay meant. But she never thinks it might be something with the power to jolt her entire world and flip her upside down; not until Alex Ryan comes creeping into her life.

Chapter 1

June 1993

I read the Aeneid when I first moved to London. Trying to fight off that unmerciful voice at the back of my head coaxing me into submitting to my loneliness I delved into a pile of second-hand books I picked up from the bookshop around the corner, something I hadn’t done since I was a child. I loathed the Aeneid more than any other book I had ever read, what with its one-dimensional hero, its flimsy plot, its lack of focus. If not for its portrayal of fate and destiny I imagine I would have long forgotten about it by now. Virgil’s depiction of fate still resounded in my memory for a long time afterward. Throughout those lonely months I spent my days pondering fate, and destiny, and life paths. I wondered if everything is set out before us long before it transpires, everything under the control of fate, each of us victim to a premeditated game of dice, an unknowing victim of some ice blooded god. I wondered if there was no such thing at all—if our existence truly was a mistake, a slip-up in the mechanics of the universe, and if we were all just sauntering around with no upper hand influencing our destinies and so unfathomably insignificant that our selfish, ignorant minds could never comprehend it.