Publication Date: July 30, 2019
Publisher: Swoon Romance
Can you ever truly love someone who robbed you of everything?
Sixteen-year-old Claire Williams spends most of her days feeling angry and alone. After a car accident took her mother and Claire’s ability to walk, life in a wheelchair is the new normal.
When she’s sent to live with her grandmother, away from school and friends, Claire has a chance for a fresh start. Just when Claire thinks she can handle things, she runs into Todd - the son of the man who caused the car accident.
At first, Claire wants nothing to do with him, but the more time they spend together, the more she hates to admit her feelings. She’s slowly falling in love with Todd.
Now, Claire’s father wants to move and take Claire with him. But she can’t go. Not now when everything is falling into place, and she’s just now finding herself. Claire’s defiant. She won’t leave Greenwood, her new friends, her grandmother, or Todd.
Can Claire find the strength to let her dad go on with his life while leaving her behind to live hers, or will she allow the guilt and shame of surviving the accident pull her back under?
Excerpt
At ten o’clock, Grandma tells me she’s heading to bed. I wheel my chair outside onto the back deck, where I sit for a while, breathing in the cool, Nebraska air, staring up at the stars. I’m not ready to go to sleep and have tomorrow come. Everything feels so new and foreign to me right now, like I haven’t had enough time to adjust to everything yet—a new home, the issues with my father, and now a new school without any of my friends.
The nights are starting to get a little cooler, and I’m grateful for the respite from the heat that made my grandmother’s house stifling earlier this afternoon. But now, cozy under the soft, pink blanket my grandmother knitted for me when I was small, I’m able to take a few moments to reflect upon everything that happened today. It isn’t that I didn’t enjoy being around my grandmother, but sometimes I just need the freedom I am no longer able to have since moving in with her. Although I know she is only looking out for me, I can’t help but think she worries a little bit too much.
It isn’t long before my eyes start getting heavy, and I head back inside to get ready for bed. As I put on my pajamas and brush my teeth, I realize tomorrow is going to be the first time I’ve been completely alone since fourth grade. I don’t know anyone, and no one knows me. I’m more afraid than I have been in a long time, considering I’m not one of those people who can easily reinvent herself and be what she couldn’t at her old school. But at the same time, maybe something good could come out of it, after all.
As I get cozy in bed, I set the bracelet with the flower charm on the nightstand next to the framed picture of my mother, father, and me. The picture was taken when I was in seventh grade, when we went on a trip to the zoo a few miles from our old house. It was the most recent family photo I could find, and the only one I brought with me when I moved in with my grandma. It’s one of the things that keeps me afloat. Sometimes memories are all you have left of a person.
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