CHAPTER TWO · BLUE, WHITE, RED

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The paint had been drying on her cheekbones for an hour by the time Juliette saw him.

The room was loud with people she barely knew. Beer on the table, football on the screen, everyone shouting at once. She had come because someone had invited her, and because saying no again had started to feel like becoming the kind of person she did not want to be.

Then he turned.

Blue eyes. That was the first thing. Not the kind people exaggerate later, but a blue that made her forget, for half a second, what she had been doing with her hands.

He was laughing at something his friend had said. Paint cracked at the corner of his mouth. He looked easy in the room, as if the noise belonged to him. Juliette hated people like that usually.

But he looked kind.

She did not speak to him that night. That part matters. Nothing happened, not really. No cinematic beginning. No sentence she would repeat years later. Just a glance across a crowded room, then the decision to look away before it became obvious she had looked too long.

Later, she would learn that he had already tried to reach her once.

A message she never answered.

A stranger she had almost missed.

But that night, she only knew this:

some people enter your life quietly, and still rearrange everything.

Your story begins with your memories...