Still With Me
Contents ( 37)
CONTENTS
Also by Jessica Cunsolo
Dedication
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Also by Jessica Cunsolo
She's With Me
Stay With Me
Dedication
To my dad, Bruno Cunsolo. Thank you for your
unwavering support, and for wholeheartedly believing
there’s no limit to what I can achieve.
Prologue
When I was in elementary school, I thought being normal was the worst thing I could grow up to be. Maybe I was six or seven. We had to imagine ourselves as a grown-up, pick a career from a preapproved list, and then do a project. There wasn’t an option I wanted, so I picked doctor and went straight home to complain about it. My dad was thoroughly confused when I explained that I didn’t want to be a doctor or lawyer or teacher, but wanted to be a hairdresser exclusively for gorillas, who also juggled part time while in a traveling ukulele band.
He tried throwing logical facts at me but I was undeterred by the fact that gorillas probably didn’t need hairdressers, or that I didn’t know how to juggle or play ukulele, and that no one even wanted to see a juggling ukulele band in the first place.
Then he hit me with the that’s not a normal career path speech. I replied, in my cutesy, little-kid way, that being normal sounded boring, and I’d much rather have interesting things happen to me, even if they made my life harder. Looking back now, I would do anything to slap six- or seven-year-old me silly and eat my words out of existence.
My dad wanted me to have a normal, boring life without hardship. I scoffed at the idea. It’s ironic how in the end he was the one who set into motion a chain of events that ensured my life would never be completely normal again.
There have been multiple attempts to end my life made by two different men, all within in the last year. There’s Tony, the man who’s quite possibly a real psychopath, and the reason I’ve had to move three times and change my identity each time in order to keep myself safe.
Then there’s my boyfriend Aiden’s biological dad, Andrew Kessler, who’s ruthless and clearly has no problem getting someone to murder a teenage girl in order to send a message to his estranged son, who’d threatened to blow the whistle on his true, shitty past and ruin his chances of becoming governor.
My mother is having an affair with the father of one of my best friends, and I have no idea if or how I should tell Mason. Plus, there’s the whole Mason’s most likely in love with me thing that I really don’t even want to think about addressing right now.