Ava Hart swore junior year at Willow Creek High would be quiet—corner seat, hoodie up, mind on APs and SATs. Then the school’s most notorious loner, Evan West, slid a wrapped chocolate into her palm during early-morning study hall and took the blame when the dragon-lady English teacher caught them. From there, the rules changed. Evan doesn’t flirt; he shows up—before dawn with coffee and a single chocolate, after class with silence that somehow feels like safety. When the golden girl of their grade, Sophie Hale, confesses to Evan under the stadium lights, Ava freezes. She knows what she wants to say—what’s been humming in her ribcage since the first chocolate—but the words don’t come. Months later, Evan is gone. Rumors say he moved. Truth says otherwise. When he returns one humid Ohio summer afternoon with a bag of chocolates and a secret carved into the edge of Ava’s old desk, everything Ava didn’t say comes crashing back: the almost-kiss in an empty classroom, the sunflowers he said reminded him of her, the way he asked whether she prefers “chocolate or everything else.” But real life doesn’t pause for high school fairy tales. There’s the kind of leaving you fix with a text, and the kind you measure in hospital hallways and September rain. Ava will learn what it means to love with both hands—one holding on, one letting go—and how a single carved name can echo across years.
10 Chapters
