Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

I grew into it. It grew into me. We blurred at the edges, became an amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.

I am a person coming undone.

Otherwise I’ll fall apart. I’m going to fall apart. I am falling apart

The sky is on fire and the night has ended.

In sickness and in health?’ she asks. ‘Till death us do part?’

I shake my head. ‘Way beyond that,’ I say. ‘For ever.’

She takes my hands and leans in for a kiss. It hurts. Suddenly everything hurts

“Nothing worth doing is easy,” Frank said. “Especially not in the beginning. But I’m not about to give up.”

I had stood up in front of a crowd and performed, and it had gone fine. Nothing horrible had happened, and I’d gotten through it. But bigger than that, I had kissed a stranger. My pulse started to pick up a little as I flashed back to the pantry, to Benji’s hands in my hair. I had kissed someone tonight, which I certainly had not been expecting to do. Not that I wanted to make a regular practice of kissing Collins’s relatives in dark pantries, but for just a moment, it had made me feel brave

He laughed softly and shook his head, and I leaned back to be able to look at his face, which was close to mine, closer than it had ever been. “What?”

“Just . . . you,” he said after a moment, with a faint smile. “Crashing a wedding.”

“Your idea.”

“I know,” Frank said. “But I was just thinking about that first night at the Orchard.”

“What about it?” I asked. I was trying to focus on having a conversation with Frank, and trying not to think about how close together we were, that he was touching my waist, that he was holding my hand.

“You just seemed so . . . diminished,” he said after a moment. “Like you were hoping nobody would see you.”

I kept my eyes on his, not letting myself look away. “And now?”

He looked right back at me as he gave me a half smile. “You’re the brightest thing in the room,” he said. He lifted his hand from my waist, and slowly, carefully brushed a stray lock of hair from my cheek. “You shine.”

My breath caught in my throat. People said those kinds of things about Sloane—not about me.

“What?” Frank asked, his eyes on mine.

“Just . . .” I took a shaky breath. “Nobody’s ever said something like that to me.”

“Then they don’t see what I see,” he said. I looked into Frank’s eyes and knew, without a doubt, that he meant every word. I started to say something when the chorus kicked in and Frank moved closer to me.

It just gets hard, always being someone’s second choice.

“You can’t just leave people behind because you think it’s going to be too hard to commit to a friendship. You can’t live your life that way.”