EVERYTHING BUT BLOOD

Eight-year-old Annabelle arrives at her grandfather's sprawling family compound, reeling from her parents' divorce, one boy steps forward to make her feel safe: Maxwell, thirteen, the son of her grandfather's fourth wife. Adopted into the family and raised alongside his father's biological children, Maxwell is folded into the family tree as "uncle",a title of structure, not blood. To everyone in the compound, that's simply who he is.
For years, it's the truth. Maxwell is Annabelle's protector, her closest friend, the person she looks for first in every crowded room. But as she grows into womanhood, something shifts, quietly, then unmistakably. The label everyone uses never changes. What they feel for each other does.
Trapped between a name that isn't true and a bond that runs too deep to deny, Maxwell makes a devastating choice: he'll be the villain if it saves her from a scandal that could destroy her. But some truths refuse to stay buried,and the closer Annabelle and Maxwell try to stay to the rules, the harder it becomes to pretend they were ever really family at all.
Everything but Blood is a slow-burn story about the space between what you're called and what you are,and how far two people will go to protect each other from a love the world would never understand.