You don't really notice the moment a story begins.
Not when it's quiet.
Not when it slips into your life like a soft pulse you mistake for your own heartbeat.
People think love arrives loudly—
that it storms its way in,
that it announces itself like a prophecy.
But mine didn't.
It came in the form of a boy who spoke gently and asked nothing of me except the truth.
Edward Hale.
The kind of name that feels like winter—cold at the edges, warm if you stand close enough.
I didn't know, then, that I would spend months learning his silences,
trying to understand the spaces he kept hidden,
the places where I would eventually lose him.
And me?
I was Cyra Voss—
A girl who was always a little too much for the world and a little too little for herself.
A girl who laughed loudly but loved quietly, like she was afraid someone would notice.
I didn't mean to let him in.
But somehow he became the one place where my guard forgot to stay up.
Where the version of me I locked away came out, barefoot and unafraid.
This isn't a love story.
At least not the kind they write in movies.
This is a story about the kind of love that teaches you how deeply a heart can want,
and how silently it can break.
About how a boy can feel like home…
and how a girl can lose herself trying to keep that home warm.
Some nights, I still feel the echo of him.
The warmth of those first months,
when his messages arrived like morning light
and I believed—foolishly—that constancy was a promise.
But this book isn't about him.
Not really.
It's about me.
About the girl who kept a love like an oath
and the boy who held her like a secret.
It's about every young girl who loved with her whole chest
and blamed herself when someone couldn't hold it.
If you're reading this,
I want you to know something before we go any further:
You are not hard to love.
Some people are just too small to hold big hearts.
And this—
This is how I learned to let go of mine.