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The story
After her parents die, a sixteen-year-old girl is taken in by the family next door. Four years later, their son is no longer just the boy who protected her, and wanting him could cost her the only home she has left.
After her parents die, a sixteen-year-old girl is taken in by the family next door. Four years later, their son is no longer just the boy who protected her, and wanting him could cost her the only home she has left.
When I was younger, my parents died, and the family next door took me in. Now, at twenty, I still live under the Morgans’ roof. Claire and Daniel Morgan served as my legal guardians until I turned eighteen. Their son, Dane, was nineteen when they took me in and was preparing to leave for university. He was never my guardian, but from the first day after the accident, he was the person who made sure I never felt abandoned.
Dane always showed up with an umbrella. His was the steady hand at my back, and he became the closest friend I had left. During those years, what I felt for him was safe and uncomplicated trust, gratitude, and the affection I had always carried for the neighbor who knew me before grief changed everything.
There was nothing romantic between us while I was growing up.
That changed four years later, when I was twenty and starting my first day at Marlowe University.
In a courtyard full of strangers, Dane called my name. I turned and forgot how to breathe.
At twenty-three, he was still the same familiar person I had always known, and somehow entirely different. The forearm beneath his rolled sleeve was more defined than I remembered, and his shoulders had broadened during his year away. He rested his hand on my head the way he always had.
The touch was familiar. My reaction to it was not.
You have never looked at him this way before, I told myself.
I looked anyway.
That night, after my first day at Marlowe, I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. Dane pulled the blanket over me and stood there longer than he needed to.
“I know I shouldn’t want this,” he murmured.
I held my breath.
His fingertips brushed a strand of hair back from my face, so gently it ached.
“Since I came home, I haven’t been able to see you the way I used to.”
In that moment, I understood that something between us had changed. The person I had trusted for years had become the first man I had ever wanted and it had happened only now, when we were both adults and old enough to understand what choosing each other might cost.