PROLOGUE

Nora’s POV

There is something nobody tells you about being seventeen the second time around.

The first time you are just living it. Too busy surviving each day to notice the details  the way morning light hits a school hallway, the particular sound of sneakers on waxed floors, the smell of cheap cafeteria food mixed with expensive cologne that somehow becomes the smell of a whole era of your life. You don’t notice any of it because you are seventeen and seventeen doesn’t know it is temporary.

The second time you notice everything.

I noticed the trophy case first. All that polished metal and gleaming glass stretching the entire length of the entrance hallway like a monument to itself. CRESTWOOD RAVENS. STATE CHAMPIONS. Three weeks. I stood there and understood immediately what kind of place this was  not a school with a hockey team but a hockey team with a school attached, and everyone inside it existing in relation to that fact whether they knew it or not.

I noticed my daughter second. Moving through those hallways like she was trespassing in them. Head down. Backpack pulled to her front like a shield. Making herself as small as a person could manage in a crowded corridor and somehow still managing to look like she was taking up too much space for the people around her.

I noticed him third.

Standing at the far end of the hallway with his Ravens jacket and his easy certainty and that expression on his face I would spend the next two months trying to decode. Not angry. Not amused. Something more complicated than either. He was looking at me the way people look at something that doesn’t fit any category they already have  with the particular attention of someone who has never needed to work that hard to figure a person out before.

I already knew I didn’t belong in any of his categories.

I was thirty four years old in a seventeen year old body with two months on a clock nobody else could hear. I had a daughter sitting three tables away in the cafeteria who didn’t know her mother was eating a sandwich twelve feet from her. I had a best friend who looked straight through me in a hospital corridor and asked if I had seen the patient who was supposed to be in that room. I had a wish I made on a crayon drawing at two in the morning and whatever ancient thing decided to answer it.

I had no business being in this hallway. No business being in this school. Absolutely no business noticing the way Alex Mercer looked at me or the way something shifted in my chest when he did.

But here is what I learned the second time around.

Life has very little interest in what you have business feeling.

I came back to Crestwood for one reason  my daughter. To fight the battles she couldn’t fight alone. To stand between her and everything trying to break her down. To be the person I didn’t have when I was her age and needed one desperately. I came back because I would do anything for the girl who once drew me a lopsided house with two stick figures holding hands and wrote MY MOMMY IS MY HERO across the top in her best five year old handwriting.

I did not come back to fall in love for the first time at thirty four years old inside a seventeen year old body with an expiry date on everything.

But the clock was ticking. And he kept showing up. And I was only human.

This is the story of how I went back to seventeen to save my daughter.

And found out along the way that I had never finished saving myself.

Two months earlier.