Chapter 1
“Jenny?”
“It’s Jennifer. No one’s called me Jenny since…”
At that moment, I knew exactly who it was. Blake. Blake Friday.
***
At nine years old, I was sitting in my room doing what I did every Wednesday night. Writing. I wrote about what it was like growing up in the small town of Yahtzee under the control of my parents. They had absolutely no business raising a child, yet they had me. I had no friends and no will to live.
Every day was exactly the same. Breakfast, school, home, homework, yelling, more yelling, and then my favorite part… writing. I didn’t want to be saved. There was something I found strangely poetic about my disastrous childhood.
But then, he wanted to save me. That was the Wednesday I first met Blake Friday, the kid who tried to save me from myself.
Now, his voice was coming through the line, older and heavier, but unmistakably his.
“Jennifer,” he said.
“Blake?”
I turned around. It had been twenty years since I last looked into those deep brown eyes, the kind that could make any woman lose her breath. It had been twenty years since I'd seen that thick, curly bush of brown hair.
Since the day I left, I had built my own enterprise. I was the founder of Elemental Trade Network, a massive multinational corporation that managed the import and export of precious minerals. I was an entrepreneur, a powerful businesswoman with absolutely no time to revisit the past.
Yet, revisiting the past was exactly what I was doing.
When I ran away from the little town of Yahtzee at sixteen years old, I swore I would never look back. I kept that promise. Until I got the message. That message. Because of that single message, the distance I had built over two decades disappeared into thin air, and I was standing right in front of Blake Friday.
