Still Here

She had a plan once. A good one. It didn't survive contact with real life.

Andrea Mara is back in her city after years away - new job, night classes, the quiet work of rebuilding a version of herself she's not sure still exists. She's not looking for anything she doesn't already have. She's learned the hard way what happens when you want too much.

Nicolás Ward is not part of the plan.

Friend of a friend, impossible to avoid, the kind of person who laughs before things are finished being funny and somehow makes every room feel easier to be in. He doesn't know where she's been or what it cost her to come back. He just keeps showing up at the same table. Patient in a way that makes her suspicious. Charming without trying.

She's assessed him completely. Filed him away. Moved on.

Except she keeps thinking about the way he laughed at something she said. And the fact that he remembered it a week later. And the way he looked at her like she was someone worth figuring out - before she'd given him any reason to think so.

She knows this feeling. She knows exactly where it leads.

She's going anyway.

Still Here is a story about getting back to yourself - and finding someone worth staying for along the way.