Chapter 1
October 3, 2023—Age 35—Aurora
My husband knows I’m meeting an old friend for lunch today.
What he doesn’t know is that part of my heart will always belong to Gale.
I’ve carried the weight of that truth since I was fifteen. Gale was the one that got away. The one I never learned how to save. The one whose name still propels my stomach into free fall.
And today, for the first time in twelve years, we’ll be face-to-face again.
Sage was understanding about my plans, more than most husbands would be. But maybe that’s because he doesn’t know everything. Not the whole story of what grew, unraveled, and lingered between Gale and me for two decades. No one does.
Speaking it aloud would be like tearing open a wound that never quite healed. But even in the silence, the scars remain, hidden beneath my skin, jagged in the hollows of my heart.
With Gale, it was never just an attraction. It was an undertow, a current we were helpless to escape. It carried us to depths where the only solid ground we could find was in each other. But we never named what lived between us. And even though we clawed our way back to shore separately, a part of me still wonders if, despite the life I built after him, we should’ve let it sweep us out to sea.
I pad into the walk-in closet of the master bedroom, the one Sage and I shared before he moved to the guest room after Austin was born. It was supposed to be temporary, a way for both of us to get the sleep we so desperately needed. But that was three years ago.
Scanning the floor along the wall where my shoes are neatly lined up, I spot the brown-and-black knee-high boots I’m looking for. I bend to grab them, but something else snags my attention: a shoelace dangling from a storage bin. Once crisp and white, it’s now a muted gray, worn by years of high-school hallways, rock concerts, and one particularly chaotic sprint from the cops through a graveyard.
My heart lurches as I ease open the bin, knowing exactly what I’ll find. My red Converse. I bought them in 2003, the summer I met Gale. They’re unwearable now, the canvas fraying and tearing under my fingers. Relics from a past I now hide away, just like I do the memories. But those memories are undeniable, etched onto the faded soles— 31, 7, 14, 20, 23. Lowering myself to sit cross-legged on the carpet, I brush a finger gently over the five numbers, the five days that changed my life.
A lifetime has passed since that summer. But it’s only now that Gale Montgomery finally knows the truth.
And we need to talk.
