prologue
Setucket Harbor was never supposed to matter.
It was just where my friend’s vacation home stood, a sleepy stretch of coastline that smelled like salt and cedar, where the nights fell quiet enough to hear your own pulse. I came here for the stillness, not for roots. I thought it would be a pause, a breath between the noise of the life I’d built and whatever came next.
Then I met her.
Clairie Bellamy, with her fragile defiance and mahogany hair that fell to the small of her back, eyes the color of caramel dusk. She didn’t belong to anyone’s story but her own, yet somehow she became every verse of mine. She carried grief like it was stitched into her ribs, and still she let joy flicker across her face as if daring the world to try and take it from her again.
The first time she spoke my name, it didn’t sound like the world’s version of me. It sounded like a secret. Like a vow.
Now this town, this cottage, this girl—they’re all I can hear in the songs. And I don’t want to hand them over to the noise waiting outside these walls. The world is hungry, and it chews delicate things down to bone. What we’ve built feels too sacred to feed it.
But love like this doesn’t stay quiet forever.
It’s salvation and ruin in the same breath, and it asks everything of me—every choice, every fear, every song I have left to give.
This isn’t the story of a rockstar in hiding.
It’s the story of what happens when you finally stop running—and let yourself be found.
