PROLOGUE
Would I change anything if I could go back—spare myself the heartache of losing him?
That’s the wrong question.
The real question is wouldhedo anything differently…knowing the price he’d pay for loving me?
December 31st, 2024
New Year’s resolutions are supposed to be practical.
Drink more water.
Call Mom—oh. Right.
Okay.
New Year’s resolutions are supposed to be practical. Exercise more. Read the books on the nightstand instead of just moving them from one side to the other. Stop saying yes when I mean no and no when I mean yes and maybe when I mean both.
But it’s 11:53 p.m on the last night of the year, and I’m sitting on my kitchen counter with a glass of wine I’ve been nursing for two hours, and I don’t want to be practical. I want to be honest.
So here it is. Honest.
This year, I want to be loved in a way that sticks. Not the kind that shows up bright and loud and then quietly finds the exit when things get complicated. The kind that stays. The inconvenient, unreasonable, completely illogical kind that doesn’t care about timing or circumstances or whether it makes any sense on paper.
I want someone to choose me. Not because I’m easy or convenient or because I make their life simpler. But because the alternative—a life without me in it—is something they can’t make peace with.
Is that too much? Probably.
It’s 11:57 p.m now.
Whatever’s coming—whatever this year decides to be—I hope it’s something I wasn’t expecting. I hope it surprises me. I hope it walks through a door I didn’t know was open and changes everything before I have time to decide whether to let it.
58
I hope it’s the kind of year I’ll still be thinking about when I’m old.
59
I hope?—
Happy New Year, I guess.
Here we go.
1
SOPHIA
Panic is not tidy.
It claws. It stammers. It tastes like copper.
Just breathe. In for four—out for eight. A trick from the yoga videos on my laptop, the ones I ran while the fake fireplace flickered on the TV. Cinnamon candles. A mug of hot chocolate steaming on a snowflake coaster.
I try to see it, the picture frames on the bookshelves, the cheap fairy lights that make the apartment glow, the gentle hum of the refrigerator that lulls me to sleep. Every detail is sharp, until the panic claws back in.
I swallow it down with another breath—in for four, out for eight—but my heartbeat is a tattoo gun against my neck. I can hear it, even through the fog of fear, drumming a frantic tempo in my ears.
