Invisible String

Prologue

Miller
People often say that love will fade. That when your heart has been broken, with enough time and distance, it'll soften around the edges and eventually loosen its grip. That it will eventually become something you can carry without it breaking your heart.

They're wrong.

Because some people just don't fade. Some people brand themselves so deeply into your soul that your body still flinches at their memory. And how you can't help your heart from looking for them in every quiet room... even when they're gone. Even when they're one of the reasons you learned how to hurt in the first place.

Graham Beaudry was my beginning and my undoing, all in the same breath.

I don't remember a time before him because there never was. We were just kids. Our moms were inseparable, and so, we were too. We were best friends by default, then by choice, and then something that felt so much bigger than the both of us happened.

Nap times turned into backyard sleepovers. Handwritten notes folded into lockers turned into late-night texts. He had always crawled through my window since before I could remember, but the reasons for it eventually became so much more, so much deeper. Those texts eventually turned into whispers in the dark that made my heart race like it already knew.

I loved Graham before I could really understand it. And when I finally put it all together, it was already too late.

He had just turned eighteen. He was beautiful in that boyish, reckless way. The kind of beautiful you can never fully take in. The kind that hurts to look at for too long. The kind that twists your stomach and makes you forget how to speak. And I was his, completely, entirely, stupidly his.

I realized I had always been, even when he couldn't be mine.

He kissed me like I was the only thing keeping him afloat and held onto me like he was scared I'd somehow disappear.

And then one day, he just showed up. With no warning or softness in his voice. Not my Graham. Just a cold, well-practiced distance in him. He couldn't look me in the eye. Wouldn't explain himself, just that we needed to stop whatever this was. Like the idea of us had somehow turned rotten. Like we were a huge, disgusting mistake.

My stomach dropped before he could even finish speaking. My hands went cold, and all of the air left my lungs. I remember blinking, like if I didn't cry, then maybe, by some miracle, it wouldn't be real. I remember reaching for him, but he stepped back before I had the chance to hold on for dear life.

I didn't want to believe that it was real. I felt the lie in his gut-wrenching silence. In his absence. Because I knew him. I knew him. But he walked anyway, like someone cut a wire between us and didn't care if it went up in flames.

People asked questions that I didn't know how to answer. I stopped trying.

But when that heart-wrenching hurt crept in late at night, and I couldn't sleep, I'd find myself coming back to the same thought... how could he just leave? How could he just walk away from everything? Because I would have never let anything or anyone come between us.

Over time, I learned how to live around the hole he left. I got really good at smiling on command and pretending it hadn't wrecked me.

I began building a life out of pieces he didn't get to touch, like college and new friends. New routines. Safe and easy things. Things that didn't feel like him.

But the truth is, he's never really been gone.

Because how do you let go of someone who's the other half of your soul?

He lives tucked away in the in-between moments. Like the way my breath stutters when I hear The Goo Goo Dolls or The Fray on the radio. Or the taste of his name in my mouth, even when I don't dare say it out loud. And the ache in my chest every time I think I might have moved on and realize that I haven't.

How I can't.

Because loving Graham was never safe. It was never quiet. It was like a wildfire under my skin. A feeling I could never put out. It was a storm I walked straight into. And even now, with everything that I know, with all the scars left behind... part of me still loves him. Still aches for the boy who made promises in the dark and broke them by morning.

And now that he's back, I'm drowning in a breath I don't remember how to take.

☁️

COMING SOON!