PROLOGUE
KEIRA
Do you ever sit in the quiet and let your mistakes find you?
Not the small ones you eventually forget about, but the choices that split your life into before and after. The ones that replay at 3 a.m., when sleep feels like a cruelty you don't deserve.
Every wrong turn you made believing it was the only road.
Every time you laughed when you wanted to scream.
Every no that died on your tongue because you'd already learned what happened when you said it aloud.
Every night you pressed your face into a pillow and sobbed without making a sound because somewhere along the way, even your grief turned invisible.
Do you ever think about the other life? Not the perfect one. I stopped believing in perfect a long time ago. But the possible one.
The shadow life that runs parallel to this one, just out of reach.
The version of you who didn't learn love through endurance.
Who wasn't taught that suffering was the price of being seen.
Who didn't have to learn there was a price on love.
Because I do.
All the time.
I usedto believe love would be gentle.
That someone would look at me and see something worth choosing. Worth staying for, without conditions or bruises hidden beneath long sleeves.
Instead, I learned that love can look like chains. The kind that lives between your ribs, tightening every time you breathe too deeply.
Love became a voice that whispered I was lucky anyone stayed at all. That I should be grateful for scraps. That no one else would ever want something this broken.
So I made myself smaller. Quieter.
Until I forgot what it felt like to take up space in my own life.
I didall of it alone.
Endured alone. Disappeared alone.
I brought my son into this world in a room full of strangers—no one holding my hand, no voice telling me I would be okay.
Just bright, indifferent lights and machines that didn't care whether I lived or died.
And through all of it, my heart kept reaching for someone who wasn't there.
Someone I pushed away with a lie I told myself was mercy.
There was a man once.
Before all of this.
A man who looked at me like I was inevitable. Not a choice. Not an option. But a certainty.
