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[This is a romance story with some mentions of substance abuse and homophobia.]      I should have known that my day is about to take a turn for the worse when I spot my ex from Sixth Form in the produce section of the supermarket where I work. It’s as if an unwelcome ghost from my past is paying me a visit; thirteen years after we broke up and I still recognise her instantly. She’s tall and elegantly lean, with curly red hair that falls past her shoulders. She’s still as fashionably dressed as she’d always been in our teenage years.  I wonder where her life had taken her that she would be buying strawberries at an upscale supermarket at ten in the morning, but I don’t dare approach her. Instead, I disappear into the stock room of the store until I am quite sure that she has left. I would be mortified if she saw me and asked me how my own life is going. When we broke up after going to separate universities, I was beginning a programme in nuclear engineering at my country’s