After the Storm

Seventeen-year-old Cory Le Rose has mastered the art of disappearing.

Head down in the hallways. Quiet answers in class. Never too loud, never too difficult, never enough to give people a reason to look too closely. It's easier that way. Easier than explaining the panic attacks, the shaking hands, or the kind of home that teaches you to apologize for taking up space.

Then Milo Mandorez notices her.

Which would be less terrifying if Milo wasn't the exact kind of person everyone warns you about.

Quiet. Angry. Untouchable.

The boy who barely speaks unless he means it. The boy with a past nobody asks about twice. The boy who somehow sees straight through Cory anyway.

What starts as hallway conversations and matching bracelets quickly becomes something far more dangerous: being understood.

But Milo runs whenever things start feeling real, and Cory has spent her whole life believing people eventually leave. Somewhere between football games, late-night window conversations, almost-confessions, and the kind of silence that hurts worse than yelling, the two of them find themselves caught between friendship and something neither of them knows how to name.

And when the storm inside both of them finally starts to break, they'll have to decide whether loving someone is worth the risk of losing them.