Rita Pearl
In Calder City, no one falls in love before twenty-one. That's the law. Not written in cruelty — written in *wisdom*, the Matchers say. Grow first. Learn who you are. Trust the Institution to find who you're meant to become, and on your twenty-first birthday, they'll hand you a name and a lifetime, ninety-four percent guaranteed.
Wren Callahan has already broken the rule. She broke it at fifteen, the day Theo Ferrow made her laugh so hard she forgot to be careful. She's been breaking it every stolen night since — on a rooftop no Matcher knows about, behind a door that doesn't lock, whispering two words that have become the only vow that matters to either of them: *always you.*
Then a lantern finds them where it shouldn't.
Now Wren has three years before her Assessment — three years to bury the truth so deep no Matcher's hands can find it, three years to keep loving a boy the whole city has decided she isn't allowed to want. One mistake, and they're both cast out to become the next whispered warning told to seven-year-olds at Rites.
So Wren does the one thing no one expects. She applies to become a Matcher herself — to learn the Institution's every rule, every ledger, every crack in two hundred years of "perfect" compatibility — so that when her name is called in the Hall, it isn't a stranger's hand that decides her fate.
It's hers.
Because Wren isn't waiting to find out who they think she belongs with.
She already knows. And she's not letting a ledger tell her otherwise — not without a fight, not without breaking every rule this city has left.
Always him. Always has been.
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