So, no longer an infant author, I took my manuscript and helped it grow up. I didn’t think it was possible to love it more, but here I am. I love it because it’s the story I wrote when I met the man I now call my husband, filled with that longing and hope and yearning. It’s the story I wrote when I was barely out of my teenage years myself, and the story I recrafted with the confidence that only comes from thinking through a manuscript for more than a decade. I don’t say this often, but I am proud of it. I’m proud, and so excited for it to finally move past the small group of passionate supporters it found years ago and make its way into the world.

This book has existed alongside me for more than a third of my life. I hope you enjoy it. I really do. It took a mammoth effort by countless people pushing for far too long to get it into your hands today.

And I am so glad the world it’s being sent out into has improved in so many measurable ways from the world it was conceived in.

Love,

Sophie

ONE DANNI

I’m about halfway through my tour of Bramppath College when I get the sneaking suspicion I’ve dropped myself smack in the middle of shark-infested waters. And growing up in Boulder, Colorado, I never even learned how to swim.

Bramppath College is a stupidly prestigious boarding school, full of stupidly rich kids who all own Porsches, or BMWs, or whatever. Some of my classmates will be royalty—literally—and the rest will be nothing like my friends back home.

I belong at a red brick school, with desks decorated in permanent marker, and paint chipping off the walls, and everyone old friends with everybody else in their class. But now I’m enrolled in a place where the students sit around roses and honeysuckle, and eat at mahogany tables, and don’t look at girls like me unless it’s down.

Hellene, the bubbly woman who works in the uniform shop and is our temporary tour guide, is nice enough, I guess. But that’s no reason to let down my guard around rich people just yet. She doesn’t exactly seem like she drove a Porsche to work. Still, she’s either high-key obsessed with the school, or she’s being paid a decent amount to pretend to be, because she’s been rattling off facts about the buildings like she’s on speed. Mom’s super into it, though. The two of them are walking way ahead of me, talking like they met fifteen years ago instead of fifteen minutes.