Dedication

For Noni

You were so loved.
You are so missed.
You (and your Romeo) are so alive in our memories.

Prologue

The first time Will Sterling saw Nora Clarke, he could barely see at all.

In the cool shade of the large maple tree he leaned against on that bright summer day, the whole world looked blurry to him—the leaves above him green but shapeless, the patio furniture to his left dull black but soft-edged, the building in front of him tall and sand-colored, the back doors for each apartment little more than dark, smudgy rectangles leading out to wood-built balconies whose slats looked wavy unless he squinted.

He’d gotten used to it, the blurriness, or maybe he’d never really had to get used to it. He couldn’t quite remember a time when he didn’t have to narrow his eyes to bring things into focus, though he knew it’d been getting worse. He knew that sitting in the second row of most of his classes didn’t cut it anymore; he knew that last year he sometimes left third period—AP Lit, his only class with Caitlin, who liked to sit way in the back—with a thudding headache. He knew the dull white leather of the baseball had become the most important thing about it, that he saw it best against the bright blue of a clear sky, that he was more likely to get chewed out by Coach on cloudy days.

He knew he couldn’t always tell anymore, unless he was really up close to her, whether his mother was smiling.

But . . . glasses? Will Sterling in glasses? Out on the field, in those huge, sweaty-looking sports goggles Brandon Tenney wore?

He couldn’t come around to the idea, not yet. So all last year, he’d dodged the school nurse when she did eye exams, took notes off the person next to him instead of from the board or the projector screen, always asking—politely, he hoped charmingly—first. He crossed his fingers for sunny days.

He let his unreliable eyes drift back to the smudgy black rectangle he’d been trying his best to watch most closely, the one from which he’d made his unceremonious exit barely twenty minutes ago.

“Wait outside,” his mother had said in a sharp, unfamiliar voice, once it’d been clear that things weren’t going according to whatever plan she’d had when the day started. A two-anda-half-hour drive into Chicago, a city Will had never been to before, a promise not to tell his father, and not a single word of preparation for that moment when they’d stood in the dim first-floor hallway of this apartment building and she’d knocked on the door with a determined insistence that had almost felt rude.