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**Author:** Jennifer Hartmann

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The long shadow of childhood cruelty, the impossible mathematics of forbidden love, and the slow, painful work of learning to believe you deserve to be saved.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who want a romance that does not flinch from its own complications. This is a story about two people who find each other at exactly the wrong time, and the years it takes for time to catch up. It is for anyone who has ever loved someone they should not, and for anyone who has had to learn that wanting to be loved is not the same as being weak.

Halley is seventeen years old when she meets Reed at a lake behind a house party. She is lying about her age. He is thirty-four and searching for his runaway daughter. They talk for hours about music and the small moments she calls blips, the fleeting seconds of happiness she tries to capture and keep. The connection is immediate and electric, the kind of pull that does not ask permission. And then her neighbor shouts her real name and age across the living room, and Reed walks out the front door without a word. What follows is not a simple story. Jennifer Hartmann does not pretend that the age difference between Halley and Reed is not a problem. She does not pretend that Reed's position as the father of Halley's best friend is not a complication. Instead, she builds an entire novel inside those complications, letting the weight of them press down on every scene. The result is a romance that feels earned precisely because it is so difficult. The novel moves through years, not months. It begins with Halley as a girl who has been taught by her father that she is worthless, that she cannot do hard things, that love is something that gets cooked and served for dinner. It ends with Halley as a woman who has built a life for herself, who has learned to fight, who has learned that the things she was taught about herself were lies. In between is a love story that spans nearly a decade, a friendship that nearly breaks under the weight of secrets, and a family that has to learn how to forgive. The tone is intimate and aching. Hartmann writes close to her characters' skin, letting the reader feel every bruise, every stolen glance, every moment of restraint that nearly snaps. The atmosphere shifts from the cold violence of Halley's childhood home to the warmth of the Stephens household, from the charged silence of Reed's apartment to the open air of a Charleston beach.…