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Dedication

For everyone who loves with a heart

that bruises easily but beats boldly

Dedication

“How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?”

— Albert Einstein

AUTHOR’S NOTE

dear reader,

while this story is a romance, it contains content that may be triggering for some readers.

please note that the content warnings contain spoilers.

love,

BLAKE

1999

“Say something,” Sydney demanded, shoving a Polaroid into my face. It was a blurry snapshot of her at some party, laughing and leaning into some guy’s chest, his arm possessively wrapped around her waist.

I stepped out of the shower, water dripping down my chest, barely registering the picture she waved around like a warning. “Syd, it’s just a picture.”

“Just a picture?” she repeated, her voice rising in disbelief. “That’s all you have to say, Blake? You don’t even ask who he is, you don’t ask what this means. Nothing.” She let out a sharp, humorless laugh. “You know what’s funny? I thought this would piss you off. I thought you’d see this and—” She shook her head, swallowing hard. “But you don’t care, do you?”

I snatched a white towel from the rack, wrapping it loosely around my waist before finally turning to face her. “Do you want me to scream at you, Sydney? Is that what this is?”

She glared at me, clutching the Polaroid in her hand.

“You want me to lose it?” I asked. “Start throwing accusations like that will somehow change things? Because if that’s what you want, then just say the word. I can do that. I can yell and play the role, the jealous, furious boyfriend. I can ask all the questions you expect me to ask. But let’s not pretend that’s what this is about.”

Her brown eyes narrowed into unforgiving slits.

“Unbelievable,” she muttered, pacing the small space between the sink and the door. “You just don’t feel anything, do you?”

“If you’re hoping to make me jealous, it’s not working.”

For a moment, the fire in her eyes flickered. “So that’s it, huh? I’ve spent weeks trying to be patient, trying to be good enough, but I’m done. I’m done trying to make you want me.”

I should have said something, but the words I needed to speak were trapped in my throat, refusing to come out.

Sydney was trying to play it tough, but I knew better.

She was waiting for me to fight for her.

“I don’t know what you want me to say.” I sighed, not even recognizing my own voice anymore. It sounded tired. Defeated. Maybe even cold.

“You never do. It’s like you’re not even here half the time.” She stepped closer, folding her arms tightly across her chest. “You don’t care that I hooked up with Ethan last week, do you?”

Ethan. The guy who sat behind me in school, always bragging about his dad’s yacht and the ski trips they took every winter.

Part of me wanted to feel something. Anything. Anger, hurt, disgust, betrayal. But when I looked at her, when I listened to her voice crack with that last sentence, all I could muster was a dull ache in my chest, like a bruise that had long since faded.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.  “Do you want me to care?”

Her hands curled into fists, and her voice rose, trembling with frustration. “Are you sleeping with someone else?”

“No.”

“Then what?” she pressed, louder this time. “What is it, Blake? Why do you look at me like I’m a stranger?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just⁠—”

I just can’t force something that isn’t there.

I just can’t stop loving someone else.

“You just what?” she demanded. “You just stopped caring? You just woke up one day and decided I wasn’t worth it?”

“It’s not like that.”

“Then what is it like?” She was begging now. “Because I’m running out of ways to convince myself that this isn’t all in my head.”

I looked at her then—really looked at her.

Sydney was pretty. And she deserved better than the half-hearted scraps I’d been giving her. She deserved someone who could say I’m yours and mean it with every fiber of their being. Someone who could look at her the way I looked at Beverly.

How do you tell someone you don’t love them—not because they are unworthy of love or haven’t tried hard enough, but because someone else has already taken that place in your heart? How do you shape something so cruel into words that won’t leave scars behind?

You could say I’m sorry, but apologies won’t change the way your heart beats for someone else. You could say you deserve better, but that won’t soften the sharp edges of rejection.

“Sydney,” I said softly, stretching out her name as if it might somehow buy me more time, more courage. “You’re my⁠—”

“Don’t say it, Blake.” Her voice was sharp, but her eyes were pleading. “Don’t you dare say ‘friend’. Not tonight.”

For a moment, I braced myself, half-expecting her to throw something at me. But she didn’t. She just exhaled sharply, shaking her head. “You don’t even know how to admit it, do you? That you don’t love me. That you never did. That’s why you won’t let me kiss you and why you keep me at arm’s length.”

I didn’t answer.

I couldn’t.

Because she was right.

Because my heart wasn’t hers.

“You’re such a coward, Blake,” she choked out, blinking back the tears she refused to let fall. “God, you can’t even give me that. You can’t even tell me the truth.”

I exhaled slowly, rubbing my temples. I was so tired.

Tired of pretending. Tired of trying to be something I wasn’t. Tired of standing in front of a girl who deserved more and giving her nothing.

Sydney’s voice shook with desperation, her tone rising in one final, frantic effort to drag the truth out of me. “Is it because of Beverly?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t have to.

She saw it in the way my jaw clenched, in the way my hands curled into fists at my sides, and in the way I didn’t deny it.

It must have been written all over my face.

“Of course it is.” A broken laugh escaped her, and she pressed a hand to her forehead, as if she couldn't believe it had taken her this long to put it together. “It’s always been her, hasn’t it?” The tears finally spilled over, and she wiped them away furiously, like she was angry at herself for crying in front of me. “God, I’m so stupid. I’ve been sitting here for weeks, trying to figure out what I did wrong. Trying to be enough for you. But it was never me, was it? It was always her.”

The silence that followed was deafening.

“Jesus Christ.” Her voice was hollow, stripped of everything but contempt. “You’re pathetic.”

She turned and walked out, slamming the door behind her.

The sound rang out like a gunshot, leaving me alone in the too-small bathroom with nothing but my reflection and the weight of her words. And Beverly’s name—lingering in my chest like a wound that wouldn’t close.

I let out a bitter laugh that barely made it past my throat, tipping my head back against the cold tile wall. Beverly.

Always, always Beverly.

That was the problem—the truth I couldn’t admit out loud.

“What happened?”

I stiffened and turned my head.

And there she was.

She stood in the doorway, barefoot, arms crossed, her face a mix of concern and frustration.

She must have heard everything.

Her blonde hair was a mess, and she was drowning in a white oversized sweatshirt she had stolen from my closet years ago—one that should have looked ugly but somehow didn’t.

She looked so effortlessly beautiful it hurt.

“She’s gone,” I finally said, as if that explained everything.

“Clearly,” she shot back, unimpressed. “So? What happened?”

“She’s losing her mind,” I muttered. “It’s nothing.”

“It didn’t sound like nothing. She was screaming your name, Blake. My name, too. Want to explain that?”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“Not a big deal? She’s out there crying because of you, and she was screaming my name like it’s my fault.”

“She’s gone,” I repeated, not meeting her gaze. “It’s over.”

“Blake, what did you do? What did you say to her?”

“It’s not what I did,” I strangled out. “It’s what I couldn’t do.”

I made the mistake of looking at her then. The second our eyes met, something cracked open inside my chest.

We stared at each other, the silence between us somehow louder than anything Sydney had just screamed.

“I’m tired,” I sighed. “Just drop it, Beverly.”

“That’s not an answer.”

I laughed dryly. “Well, it’s all I’ve got right now.”

“Blake,” she said softly. “Just tell me what happened.”

I swallowed hard, the weight of everything crashing down on me at once. “I told her the truth. Or at least, I tried to.”

“And what truth is that?”

That I feel like I’m drowning.

That my heart aches in a way that has become too familiar.

That your presence feels like both salvation and destruction.

But I didn’t say any of that.

Instead, I let the words fall from my lips before I lost my nerve. “That I never loved her. Because I was too busy loving you.”

Beverly’s eyes softened, but there was something else there, too—something that looked a lot like pain.

For a moment, I thought she might say something.

For a moment, I thought she might stay.

But instead, she turned.

And then she was gone.

BEVERLY

I grew up in a quiet neighborhood, the kind where people nodded in passing and Mrs. Martínez would leave baskets of homemade muffins on front porches. Our house wasn’t fancy by any means, but it was ours—a place where love was louder than money, where care was measured not in material things but in time and attention. My parents were good people—respected, known, and trusted. I felt it in every packed lunch my mother made, in every bedtime story my father read, even when his eyes were heavy with exhaustion, and in the way they held me when I scraped my knee. I was spoiled. Not with trips to Disney World or endless piles of toys, but with love. With the certainty that I would never face the world alone.

My father made sure of that.

He wasn’t just a dad; he was a protector. Not just of me, but of our entire town. A real-life superhero, I called him, though he never wore a cape. He wore a badge instead, a symbol of duty and justice. It gleamed on his chest every time he walked out the door, and I remember staring at it, mesmerized.

There was a sense of pride in saying ‘My daddy fights the bad guys,’ in seeing the way other kids widened their eyes when I said it. But there was also something heavier beneath that pride, something that made my stomach twist when the sun went down, and I sat by the screen door, waiting.

I would sit on the floor, my Barbie dolls laid out in front of me, their tiny plastic bodies dressed in gowns that I’d meticulously chosen. But my eyes weren’t on them. They were fixed on the road outside, watching every pair of headlights that passed. I counted the seconds, held my breath when I heard tires roll to a stop.

Would he come home tonight? Would I hear the sound of his boots on the porch, the jangle of his keys? Would he call my name with that warm, familiar voice? Or would I wait all night, whispering silent prayers to a God I barely understood yet?

I hated the fear that crept into my bones when I sat by the door, waiting, waiting, waiting for him to come home. Even at eleven, I understood that not all daddies came home.

I learned early on that the world wasn’t as safe as my neighborhood made it seem. I may not have understood all the details, but I understood enough.

Some nights, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d creep down the stairs, careful not to wake my mother, and find him sitting in silence at the kitchen table, staring at his hands like they held all the evil he had seen.

The world has a way of staining even the brightest things.

There were days when he came home a little less of the man he was that morning. He would hold my mother for a beat longer than usual, pressing his face into her neck as if to remind himself that the world outside wasn’t the only one to exist.

He never talked about the things he saw. Not in detail. But I heard stories whispered when my parents thought I wasn’t listening behind closed doors.

Starving children with bruises blooming like storm clouds across their skin. Drug dealers with bullet holes where their hearts should have been. Women found in alleyways, their lives stolen before they had a chance to scream.

My father carried the weight of other people’s nightmares home with him. He chased shadows away so that people like us could sleep peacefully. He never told me these things, but I knew.

I was a cop’s daughter, after all.

I knew that there were children who cried for parents who would never come home. That there were girls who never got the chance to scream for help. That there were men with dead eyes, cruel smiles, and unforgiving hands—men my father locked away but could never truly erase from the world.

And so, I spent my nights waiting.

Waiting for the moment when the door would open, and my father would step back into the world of love and safety that he had created for us.

But every night, as the minutes stretched into hours, I wondered if this would be the night he didn’t.

Then, one day, my waiting changed. It wasn’t that the fear disappeared—no, that stayed, lodged in my chest like a splinter. But my focus shifted. Something else began to creep into the space my father’s absence left behind.

It happened on a warm afternoon, the kind where the sunlight hung low and heavy in the sky, drenching the world in gold. I was eleven years old when my father walked through the front door with a shadow trailing behind him. It wasn’t the kind of shadow that could be swept away by light or time. It wasn’t a shadow in the way that the sun casts one against the pavement, not something flat and fleeting. No, this was a living thing, stretching across the threshold, reaching for me.

The door creaked open, and with it, something else—something heavier—entered.

He did not arrive like sunlight spilling through an open window, warm and bright and gentle.

He arrived like twilight—slow and certain, settling into every corner of me before I realized I had already let him in.

I would later come to recognize that moment as the beginning of change, of heartache, of something inevitable and unstoppable. I would come to realize, in the months and years that followed, that this was the beginning of everything.

1

BEVERLY, 1993

11 years old

It was Wednesday, March 3rd, and I was on the phone with my best friend, Tiffany, giggling about boys—something we had only recently decided were interesting rather than gross. I sat at the bottom of the staircase, twirling the phone cord in my fingers, when I saw my father coming down the walkway. My heart leaped with relief, as it always did when he returned safe.

“I think Caleb likes you,” Tiffany teased. It was our favorite pastime—talking about the boys in our school, the ones we used to think had cooties but were suddenly worth our attention.

“Do you think so?” I grinned. “Because—” I was about to finish my sentence when the door creaked open, cutting me off mid-thought.

For the first time, Dad wasn’t alone. There was a boy trailing behind him, small and thin, his head bowed low. It wasn’t cold that day, but something about the way he stood there, his face half-hidden behind my father’s broad frame, made the hairs on my arms stand on end.

His frail frame was swallowed by oversized clothes, and his long, unkempt blond hair fell into his face like a curtain meant to shield him from the world. He lifted his eyes just long enough for me to catch their color. Green. Strikingly so.

Green like the last stubborn leaves clinging to autumn branches, filled with something I couldn’t place.

Not at the time.

Later, I would understand it was emptiness.

“I have to go,” I told Tiffany, cutting her off mid-sentence.

“But we have to talk about Cal⁠—”

I hung up and stared as my father kept the door open long enough for the boy to hesitate, to glance up at the threshold as if it were an invisible wall he wasn’t sure he was allowed to cross.

“Jenna!” he called out, his voice carrying through the house.

I blinked, confused. Where was the familiar routine of my dad coming home after a long day?

Mom came rushing from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel. She saw Dad, then the boy, and her face softened, though her eyes flickered with quiet questions.

The boy flinched when my father placed a hand on his shoulder, and I watched as Dad’s eyes misted over.

I had never seen him cry. Not once. Not when he was tired, not when he was angry, not even when his own father was taken from him in the line of duty. But in that moment, he did.

A single tear escaped, trailing down his cheek before he quickly wiped it away. “I want you to meet Blake,” he said, his voice cracking as if the words had splintered on their way out.

Blake.

The name meant nothing to me then, but it would come to mean everything.

* * *

Blake McHayes had been a foster child since he was six years old, when his father took a kitchen knife and erased his mother and younger sister from existence during a rage-filled night that left Los Angeles shaken.

It was a story so gruesome and unfathomable that it haunted even the most seasoned police officers.

He was found beneath his mother’s body, drenched in both her blood and his own, barely clinging to life. The doctors called it a miracle. The town called it a tragedy. He survived when he shouldn’t have, lived while the rest of his family didn’t. For weeks, people spoke about it. They mourned, pitied, and whispered how awful, how sad. But as quickly as the story spread, it was forgotten; the world moved on without a second glance.

Blake was left behind, at the mercy of people who failed him. He became another child shuffled through the foster care system, passed from house to house, never staying long.

They labeled him a problem. A difficult child. No one saw how badly he was suffering, except for my father, who found him alone in a basement, starving and broken. His foster home had been a drug den, a place no child should ever be forced to endure. And yet, he had. Neglected. Beaten. Forgotten.

And now, he was in our house, sitting at our dinner table, trembling when he reached for his fork. He didn’t know how to use it.

Blake was one year older than me, but in that moment, he looked so much younger.

His hand shook harder with each passing second, and I watched in silence as spaghetti slipped off his plate and fell onto the table. His entire body tensed, and he glanced up at my father with fear in his eyes; the same fear I imagined he had felt many times before—fear of punishment, fear of rejection, fear of being unwanted.

“Use your hands if you need to,” Mom said, her voice soft and calm, almost like she was speaking to a wounded animal she was trying to coax into trusting her. “Don’t worry about the mess.”

My jaw nearly dropped.

If I had used my hands, she would have scolded me for days.

Blake hesitated, looking at her as if she had just spoken in an unknown language, then carefully picked up a handful of spaghetti with his fingers and stuffed it into his mouth.

I watched in horrified fascination. Not because it was gross, but because this boy—who was older than me—didn’t know how to use a fork.

His eyes flickered up to my father now and then, as if checking for signs of disapproval.

Dad just smiled at him, scratching his chin thoughtfully.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. It was a smile that spoke of something that made me question my own place at the table.

Part of me wanted to resent this boy. This was my house. My family. My life. And now, suddenly, he was here, this broken boy with sad eyes and a past too heavy for him to carry alone.

I watched him that whole night.

Watched the way his eyes darted around the room, memorizing exits. Watched the way he ate—fast, like someone might take his plate away at any moment. Watched the way he glanced at my father like a stray dog unsure if it could trust the hand offering food.

Watched the way he never once met my gaze.

Not once did his eyes find mine. Not in the moments when he nervously glanced up at my father. Not when my mother offered him a reassuring smile.

I couldn’t blame him.

Who would want to look someone in the eye when they felt like they were nothing but a burden, a mistake?

This boy had been through hell and come back from it.

Blake finished the food in record time, but when the last bit of spaghetti was gone, a pained expression settled over his face, his hands clutching his stomach.

I watched him in silence, my own meal forgotten, the weight of the moment pressing down on me like something thick and suffocating.

“Are you okay?” Mom asked, her voice laced with concern.

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