Palagi

​For Eloise Hope Lana, life is a series of measured inhalations and calculated silences. To her father, her chronic asthma is a "lack of discipline." To her professors, she is a brilliant Psychology student with a prestigious future. But behind the closed doors of her dorm, Eloise is a girl drowning in a sea of maintenance meds, nebulizer masks, and the agonizing itch of anxiety. She has spent twenty years perfecting the art of being invisible while standing in the spotlight. She didn't need a hero. She just needed to graduate without collapsing.

​Then she met Joaquin Xavier Choi.

​A sharp-witted Law student who plays by his own rules. He is the distraction she can't afford, the one who drives through the night to find her, who memorizes the sound of her wheezing, and who refuses to let her dad's voice be the loudest thing in her head.

​But as the world closes in and the pressure to be a "Lana" reaches a suffocating peak, Eloise is forced to face the ultimate question: Is she fighting to live, or just fighting not to die?

​In a city that never sleeps and a family that never forgives, Joaquin offers the only thing that doesn't come with a price tag. No conditions. No expectations. Just a steady hand when hers are shaking.

​Through the gasping, through the panic, and through the silence that follows the storm.

​Palagi.