In the foster care system, survival comes before love.
Seventeen-year-old Nexa has been bounced from house to house for most of her life, carrying the trauma of watching her father murder her mother and learning early that nobody stays. By the time she lands in her ninth foster home under the cruel and manipulative Paula, she expects more of the same.....neglect, control, and emotional warfare.
What she doesn’t expect is family.
Living there are Kace and Jace, fearless twins with sharp mouths and sharper survival instincts, and Phelon, the quiet, guarded boy with heavy eyes and a past as broken as hers. Together, they become the first people who ever make Nexa feel like she belongs. Between late night smoke sessions, laughs, hustles for money, and dreams of escape, they build something rare: loyalty.
But Nexa is hiding more than pain, she’s in love with Phelon.
She keeps it buried, convinced he only sees her as a little sister while he chases girls who seem prettier, louder, and easier to love. Still, every look, every late-night conversation, every moment he protects her pulls her deeper.
When the group starts planning to run away to New York and leave foster care behind for good, hope finally feels possible. But survival has its own rules. Desperate for money, Phelon and Jace make a reckless move that ends with handcuffs, courtrooms, and three-year prison sentences.
Before Phelon is taken away, Nexa does the one thing fear never let her do before....she kisses him.
With Phelon and Jace locked up, Nexa and Kace flee to Brooklyn, determined to build the life they all dreamed about. Through letters and late-night phone calls, Nexa and Phelon finally admit what’s always been there between them. Love grows in the spaces prison walls can’t touch… until silence hits. No calls. No letters. No explanation.
Three years later, Nexa is twenty-one and living a life that looks successful from the outside—designer bags, luxury apartments, and a wealthy boyfriend named Tyriq who promised to save her. Instead, she finds herself trapped in a toxic relationship built on control, manipulation, and emotional abuse, working nights as a dancer while trying to remember the girl she used to be.
Then Phelon comes home.
But he doesn’t come alone.
Now back in Brooklyn with Ava, the woman who stood by him during prison. Phelon’s return reopens every wound Nexa tried to bury. Old feelings crash into new realities, unfinished love collides with bad timing, and everyone must decide whether love is enough when life has already changed everything.
Because sometimes the hardest words to say are the simplest ones:
If you love me… just say that.
Genre: Romance
Seventeen-year-old Nexa has been bounced from house to house for most of her life, carrying the trauma of watching her father murder her mother and learning early that nobody stays. By the time she lands in her ninth foster home under the cruel and manipulative Paula, she expects more of the same.....neglect, control, and emotional warfare.
What she doesn’t expect is family.
Living there are Kace and Jace, fearless twins with sharp mouths and sharper survival instincts, and Phelon, the quiet, guarded boy with heavy eyes and a past as broken as hers. Together, they become the first people who ever make Nexa feel like she belongs. Between late night smoke sessions, laughs, hustles for money, and dreams of escape, they build something rare: loyalty.
But Nexa is hiding more than pain, she’s in love with Phelon.
She keeps it buried, convinced he only sees her as a little sister while he chases girls who seem prettier, louder, and easier to love. Still, every look, every late-night conversation, every moment he protects her pulls her deeper.
When the group starts planning to run away to New York and leave foster care behind for good, hope finally feels possible. But survival has its own rules. Desperate for money, Phelon and Jace make a reckless move that ends with handcuffs, courtrooms, and three-year prison sentences.
Before Phelon is taken away, Nexa does the one thing fear never let her do before....she kisses him.
With Phelon and Jace locked up, Nexa and Kace flee to Brooklyn, determined to build the life they all dreamed about. Through letters and late-night phone calls, Nexa and Phelon finally admit what’s always been there between them. Love grows in the spaces prison walls can’t touch… until silence hits. No calls. No letters. No explanation.
Three years later, Nexa is twenty-one and living a life that looks successful from the outside—designer bags, luxury apartments, and a wealthy boyfriend named Tyriq who promised to save her. Instead, she finds herself trapped in a toxic relationship built on control, manipulation, and emotional abuse, working nights as a dancer while trying to remember the girl she used to be.
Then Phelon comes home.
But he doesn’t come alone.
Now back in Brooklyn with Ava, the woman who stood by him during prison. Phelon’s return reopens every wound Nexa tried to bury. Old feelings crash into new realities, unfinished love collides with bad timing, and everyone must decide whether love is enough when life has already changed everything.
Because sometimes the hardest words to say are the simplest ones:
If you love me… just say that.
Genre: Romance
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