Wrecked

A woman stands at her bedroom window, watching rain obscure the world outside.

A woman stands at her bedroom window, watching rain obscure the world outside. She is numb—has been since a rescue vessel brought her back from an island eight months ago. She writes a letter to her older sister Katie, the person she loves most besides the man she lost. She stayed as long as she could, for the child sleeping in the next room. But the pain of breathing without him has become unbearable. She prepares to tell the truth she has hidden since returning: about a love that began at sixteen, a man her sister also loved, and why she can no longer pretend to be alive when the half of her soul that kept her breathing is already gone.

A physics tutor becomes the reason to stay alive

Sixteen-year-old Ellie signed up to tutor on Saturdays to escape her alcoholic stepfather Chris. Eighteen-year-old Nate needed to pass physics to keep his football scholarship and flee his own abusive father, the district attorney Nathaniel Westin. When Nate walked into the school library and saw the auburn-haired girl waiting at the back table, something elemental shifted between them. He gave her a nickname—Pip, for pipsqueak—and she gave him his: Nate, not Nathan. He took her to a hidden lake on his grandmother's property and taught her a grounding technique for anxiety. Within weeks they were inseparable, kissing in the stacks, passing each other secret touches in the hallways. Neither knew the other's home harbored a monster. Both recognized, instinctively, a shared fluency in concealed pain.

Ellie finds Nate with pills and no will to live

After a savage beating left Nate with a fractured cheekbone and broken rib, he locked himself in his bathroom with a bottle of his mother's stolen Xanax. He had stared at those pills for six months. Tonight, he dumped them into his shaking hand and lifted it toward his mouth. A knock interrupted the silence—Ellie's voice, calling his name. She had driven past his house three times, increasingly panicked. When she saw the front door standing open, she walked straight in. She found him on the tile, pills scattering across the floor as his hand dropped. She said nothing. She simply held him while he wept. That night she climbed into his bed and stayed, whispering the same word before sleep took him: stay. She came back every night after that, tethering him to life with a single syllable.

A father's blackmail turns love into a weapon against itself Two months before graduation, Nathaniel pinned Nate to his headboard by the throat and delivered an ultimatum. He had discovered the relationship and…