Chapter 1 - The First Crack in CautionI was twenty-four years old when I begged the man I loved to let me die with him.

Evan Mercer was lying in a hospital bed in Boston, his heart failing beneath my hand, his breath thinning with every sunrise we had once promised to share. I had my arms around him as if holding tightly enough could anchor him to the earth. Outside the window, morning was beginning over the Charles River, bright and cruel and completely unaware that my life was ending inside that room.

“If you cannot stay,” I whispered against his chest, “let me go with you.”

Evan smiled the way dying people should not be able to smile. It was soft, tired, and still full of the boy who had once kissed me under the bleachers during a thunderstorm. He lifted one cold hand to my cheek.

“Do not follow me, Claire,” he whispered. “You still have a whole life.”

I shook my head because I was young, shattered, and certain love meant refusing any world where he was not breathing. “You are my whole world,” I said.

His thumb moved once against my skin. “No,” he whispered. “I was only the first person who showed you what light looked like. After I am gone, you still have to walk toward it.”

Then his hand loosened in mine, and I learned the human heart can keep beating after it has been broken beyond recognition.

I met Evan Mercer on the first Friday of June, when I was seventeen and still believed grief was something that happened to other families. Blue Harbor, Maine, was the kind of coastal town that looked harmless in postcards and complicated in winter. Locals saw second mortgages, cold mornings, tourists parking badly, and fathers who worked through pain because the ocean did not care whether your back hurt.

I grew up above my mother’s bakery on Harbor Street, where the floors smelled of cinnamon, yeast, and old wood. My mother raised me alone after my father left when I was six. By seventeen, I had learned to be careful. Careful girls do not expect miracles.

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Evan was not careful. He entered my life by falling through the bakery door with rain in his hair and a cardboard box full of wet library books in his arms. He was the boy who broke the auditorium piano during the principal’s speech by playing it with his feet. He said the librarian was going to kill him for ruining The Once and Future King, but explained he had been carrying books to the senior center because Mrs. Alvarez wanted Arthurian legends and mystery novels. “She says old people deserve knights and murders,” he said.

That was the first crack in my caution.