Read an Excerpt

It started with a message. Late one night. A glowing screen. A few playful words that should have meant nothing.

She read it twice. Then a third time. And the third time was the one that mattered — because by then she had stopped pretending she was only checking the spelling.

HIM: You awake?

Two words. That was all. She stared at them until the screen dimmed, then tapped it bright again, as if the message might have changed. It hadn't. It didn't need to.

Her thumb hovered. She could leave it. She should leave it. There were a hundred good reasons to put the phone face-down and go to sleep and wake up as the sensible woman she was in daylight. She typed anyway.

HER: I am now.

The little dots appeared almost instantly. Disappeared. Appeared again. That pause — that small, deliberate pause — did something to her she didn't have a name for yet.

HIM: Good. I was hoping you would be.

She pressed her lips together against a smile no one was there to see.

HER: You're trouble. You know that?

HIM: Only the kind you like.

Outside, the street was quiet. Inside, her heart was doing something reckless and unfamiliar — something that had nothing to do with the hour and everything to do with the name lighting up her screen. This was the part where she was supposed to stop. Where she was supposed to remember all the reasons this was a bad idea.

Instead she settled deeper into the dark, phone glowing against her cheek, and let the next message pull her one word closer to a line she had promised herself she would never cross.

Neither of them planned for it to become real.

But sometimes the smallest spark is all it takes.

And fire has a way of growing.