Chapter One
Jax
The night my life ended didn’t begin with darkness.
It began with laughter. Not loud, not wild—just that soft, breathless kind that only Emily ever made. The kind that always felt like it belonged in the same category as prayer. Something offered. Something cherished.
She leaned across the center console, her dress glittering where the streetlights sliced through the rain-streaked windshield. I never understood how she managed to look luminous even in the dull glow of traffic signals or storm-washed nights like this one. But she did. Every time. Her dark hair was pinned up from the banquet we’d just left, though a few strands had fallen loose, curling around her face like they were reaching for warmth.
“Jackson,” she whispered, brushing her fingertips along the inside of my wrist as she twined her hand with mine.
I swear I felt that touch for years after she was gone. Sometimes in dreams, sometimes in the half-conscious haze between nightmares and waking, sometimes when the wind outside my cabin in the mountains hit the windows just right—as if she’d found a way to follow me even into the places no one else could reach.
I tore my eyes from the road for a second. One second. She was smiling—nervous, hopeful, her mouth barely lifting, her eyes flickering with something she hadn’t figured out how to say yet. My chest had already begun to warm, expanding with a kind of anticipation I didn’t deserve but clung to anyway.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” she said quietly.
“Yeah?” I squeezed her fingers, savoring the feel of her small palm against mine. “What’s on your mind?”
She laughed—soft, trembling. I felt her breath hitch more than I heard it. She lifted her free hand and placed it on her stomach.
My breath stalled.
“No,” I said, but I was already smiling. Already opening. Already imagining the way her eyes would look in morning light while she carried something—someone—made of both of us.
“Em,” I whispered, “are you—?”
She nodded. And her eyes, God, they shone. Not with the glitter of her dress or the reflections of the wet road—but with something quiet and holy.
And just like that, the world went molten gold. Warmth rose up my throat, into my cheeks. My heart pounded so hard it felt adolescent, unguarded. I brought her hand to my lips and kissed her knuckles slowly, reverently.
“You’re serious?” My voice cracked.
“As a heart attack,” she teased. “Jackson Hale, we’re having a—”
Headlights.
Too close. Too fast. Coming straight toward us.
My grip tightened around her hand reflexively. My other hand jerked the steering wheel before my brain fully caught up. Somewhere in the periphery of my vision, I saw the other driver’s face—blurry, wide-eyed, mouth open in a frozen O of horror. They were drifting across the center line, tires hydroplaning.
Wrong side. Wrong moment. Wrong everything.
“Hold on,” I told Emily—my last clear words to her.
Tires screamed as I jerked us right. Rain exploded across the windshield. The world spun. Streetlights fractured intofountains of color as the car lost traction. Emily gasped—a tiny, terrified sound that should never have existed. Metal twisted. Glass shattered. And gravity threw us into a sickening roll that ripped her fingers from mine.
Impact.
A sound like thunder cracking inside my skull. A scream I didn’t know if it came from me or her. Then—silence.
Or maybe it was me who turned into silence.
When consciousness finally clawed its way back, everything was upside down. The car hung at an angle, tipped against a guardrail, our seatbelts the only anchor keeping us suspended instead of broken on the ravine floor. Rain dripped through the shattered windows. It hit my face, cold and relentless. My ears rang so loudly it felt like standing inside a cathedral of sound.
I turned. Or tried to.
“Em.” My voice scraped its way out of my throat, brittle, unfamiliar. “Emily—breathe. Please breathe.”
