Liyana still remembered the first time she realized what it meant to love someone.
It was not a dramatic revelation, not an earth-shattering moment. Love did not crash into her all at once. Instead, it seeped in, slow and silent, like the rain that soaks into the earth before anyone notices the storm has begun.
She was seventeen.
And Damien Lu was already too far out of reach.
Their families had been close for as long as she could remember. Sunday dinners, New Year banquets, vacations where their parents would laugh over wine while the children played in the background. Except Damien had never been part of those childish games. He was already a man while she was still learning how to grow up.
He was perfect—in the way only someone completely untouchable could be.
Liyana had always been sharp, always calculating, but when it came to him, she was helplessly young.
She told herself it was admiration. That it was natural to look up to Damien—after all, everyone did. He was intelligent, confident, impossible to ignore. But admiration doesn't steal your breath when someone enters a room. Admiration doesn't make you search for someone's voice in a crowded space, doesn't make you ache with the knowledge that you will never be seen the way you want to be.
It had started with something simple.
A summer afternoon, the air thick with the scent of freshly cut grass and her mother's gardenia flowers. Liyana had been sitting on the porch, pretending to read while stealing glances at Damien, who had just returned from university. He was twenty-one then, taller than she remembered, his presence commanding even in the casual ease of their home.
He had leaned against the doorframe, watching her with mild amusement.
"You always read such heavy books," he had commented, tilting his head to glance at the pages. "Do you actually enjoy them, or do you just want people to think you're too smart for normal things?"
His words had made her heart jump, but she had masked it with a scoff.
"Not my fault your reading level is still stuck at comic books."
He had laughed, the sound deep and rich. "Cute."
The way he had said it—absentminded, like he hadn't even thought about the word before it left his mouth—made something unravel inside her.
But he hadn't noticed.
Because to him, she was still just Liyana, the little girl whose family had always been there, the one he would ruffle the hair of before walking past without a second thought.
And she—she was falling in love with a man who would never see it happen.
The word cute had settled into her bones, carving itself into a wound she could never quite reach.
It should have made her happy—any acknowledgement from him should have been enough. But instead, it left an ache, a quiet kind of devastation. Because the way Damien said it, the way his gaze barely lingered on her before he moved on to something else, made it clear.
He saw her as a child.
And Liyana hated that.
She hated the way her heart betrayed her, how it latched onto every insignificant moment between them and twisted it into something meaningful. A glance, a comment, a fleeting smile—pathetic, wasn't it? Falling for someone who didn't even know he was being loved.
That summer, she spent every moment she could in his presence. Not that it was difficult—their families were constantly together, their parents practically inseparable, their lives tangled together in a way that should have made her happy. And yet, every interaction, every shared space, only emphasized the distance between them.
Liyana watched the way Damien commanded a room without effort, the way people leaned in when he spoke, the way his father—her father's closest friend—talked about him with nothing but pride.
"Damien is set to take over soon," his father would say, a gleam in his eyes. "Sharpest mind I've ever seen in business."
Her father would nod in agreement. "Not just business. That boy could have been anything he wanted."
She would sit quietly, absorbing every word, trying not to let it show—this unbearable longing to be something in his eyes.
One evening, their families gathered for dinner at the Lu estate. The house was grand, filled with old money elegance, but to Liyana, it was just another place where Damien existed—a space he had already claimed.
She wandered through the halls, fingers grazing along the cold marble railing of the staircase, when she heard voices from the study.
Damien's. And another woman's.
Liyana stilled.
She hadn't meant to eavesdrop, truly. But something about her name slipping from his lips made her freeze.
"She follows you like a shadow," the woman teased, her voice rich with amusement.
Damien chuckled. "Liyana?"
"Who else?"
There was a pause, a long one, before he spoke again.
"She's just a kid."
And just like that, her world tilted.
It shouldn't have hurt. It shouldn't have felt like a knife slipping between her ribs, twisting at the very core of her. But it did.
Because that was all she was to him.
A kid.
A passing thought.
She turned away before she could hear the rest. Whatever else he had to say—she didn't want to know.
That night, she barely spoke during dinner. She kept her gaze down, pushed food around on her plate, ignored the laughter and the warmth that filled the room.
Damien noticed.
"You're quiet," he said casually, sipping from his glass of wine. "Lost in one of your heavy books again?"
His voice was teasing, familiar. Unaware.
Liyana forced a smile. "Just tired."
He accepted it without question.
Of course he did. Because he didn't see her.
And maybe he never would.