The Long Way Back to You

Some goodbyes are not what they look like.

Claire and Noah were the couple everyone believed in - college sweethearts who built a life together, who had a bucket list and a plan and six years of shared mornings. Then, slowly and deliberately, Claire began to pull away. Not because she stopped loving him. Because she never stopped.

What Noah does not know - what nobody knows except her best friend Jordan and her mother - is that Claire has been given a timeline. A diagnosis. A condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that has been quietly rearranging her future for eight months. She has decided: she will not let Noah spend whatever time she has left watching her die. She will give him a clean ending instead of a devastating one. She will love him by letting him go.

But first - one last thing. The bucket list they wrote at nineteen, still mostly uncrossed. Three weeks. Europe. The places they always meant to go.

What happens on that trip - in Paris and Cinque Terre and Rome and Santorini - is not what either of them planned. Old memories surface. Old feelings refuse to stay where she put them. And Noah, who has never fully stopped loving her, begins to say the things he should have said years ago.

Claire knows exactly how this ends. She has known since October.

She takes the trip anyway.

The Long Way Back to You is a raw, deeply felt debut novel about the courage it takes to love someone well - even when loving them well means breaking your own heart to spare theirs.