Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is continuing her press tour in support of her forthcoming release Dream Count — her first novel in over a decade after the award-winning Americanah — with an essay in the March issue of Vogue magazine.

The essay is titled “The Story of My First Love” and is about a tender, heartbreaking story. Adichie fell in love for the first time with a boy named Echezona, a boy who was “popular and brash” and completely unlike the studious and intellectual young Adichie. “He took to walking me home,” she writes. “I want us to be boyfriend and girlfriend,” he would say, and I would reply, “I have to think about it,” even though I wanted nothing more. One day I said yes. And so began a cracking open of my sheltered world.”

Adichie describes their romance, full of furtive first kisses and secret gifts, but her memory keeps intruding to remind her that Echezona was troubled, prone to theft. He was sent away to boarding school and they eventually parted ways. In her first year at university, Adichie learned that Echezona had died, shot by armed bank robbers when trying to deposit a check. She describes her shock after hearing the news, and then again after seeing the photograph of the violence in a newspaper office she was interviewing at, months later.

The photo forced her to confront the loss, and she reflects on her grief in the essay:

Yet I mourned the future that would now never be. With the pain and sadness came a strange sensation of having been cheated. He was my first love, but in dying, he became an idealized future that I could have had.

Adichie speculates that dealing with this loss, both of the person and of the future that could have been, is part of the inspiration for her new book:

Maybe this is why my new novel, Dream Count, is haunted by the idea of the one who could have been, the one made perfect by loss.

Dream Count weaves together the interconnected stories of four women, exploring themes of identity, the immigrant experience, and societal pressures on women, in both the US and Nigeria. At its core is Chiamaka (Chia), a travel writer in her 40s, reflecting on her unfulfilled relationships and the challenges of pursuing a life on her own terms. Dream Count comes on March 4.