Chapter 1

Helena’s morning alarm didn’t sound like a gentle wake-up call. It sounded like an overenthusiastic mariachi band caught in a thunderstorm.

I didn’t move an inch. I just lay there on my side, propped up on one elbow, waiting for the inevitable.

Right on cue, a slim, pale arm shot out from beneath the messy mountain of white duvet like a blind mole seeking daylight. Her hand slapped the nightstand twice, knocked over a dry glass, missed the phone entirely, and finally buried the screen under her palm. The trumpet solos died instantly.

From under the pillows came a long, tragic groan.

“I’m dead, Seb,” she muffled directly into the mattress.

“Call my boss. Tell them I died doing what I loved: sleeping.”

I couldn’t help the smile that pulled at my mouth. Any normal person would have begged her to change that atrocious noise months ago. I could have snuck into her settings and swapped it for soft rainfall or gentle chimes while she slept. But I never did. I loved it. I loved it because it belonged to her, because it was loud and ridiculous and entirely unfazed by the rest of the world, just like the woman currently trying to burrow deeper into my chest to steal my warmth.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” I murmured, reaching over to run my fingers through the tangled labyrinth of her dark hair.

“You know, if you stay dead, we’re going to miss our date.”

Her head popped out from under the blanket like a curious turtle, her dark eyes squinting against the morning light filtering through the blinds.

“What date?”

“The one I’ve been planning for two weeks. The one where I get to have you all to myself for twelve straight hours.”

A slow, sleepy grin spread across her lips, instantly melting the fake misery on her face.

“Oh. That date.”

She reached out, her fingers catching the front of my shirt and pulling me down until her forehead rested against mine. Her breath was warm, her skin soft, and for a quiet minute, neither of us said a word. We just breathed in the same air, wrapped in the quiet comfort of two people who had long since stopped needing to prove anything to each other.

My first thought of the morning hadn’t been about the backlog of emails waiting on my laptop, or the client calls I’d pushed to Monday, or the chaotic rhythm of the city outside our window.

It was just her. It was always her.

Getting ready for the day with Helena was a combat sport disguised as a domestic routine.

By nine o’clock, she was floating around our small apartment in a breezy, sun-yellow summer dress, humming a tune that was aggressively off-key. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to tame a stubborn cowlick at the back of my hair, listening to her wander from the kitchen to the bedroom, leaving a trail of joyful noise in her wake.

“Sebastian!” she called out, leaning against the bathroom doorframe with her toothbrush in hand. “If you spend another ten minutes admiring your own reflection, I’m leaving without you and taking the neighbor’s dog instead. At least he doesn’t fuss over his collar.”

I turned, setting my comb down, and leaned back against the sink with an amused arch of my eyebrow. “First of all, Roxy is a golden retriever and would abandon you for a piece of cheese. Second of all, I’m making sure I look presentable for my girlfriend.”

“Your girlfriend thinks you look fine when you wake up looking like you got hit by a tornado,” she said, brushing past me to spit in the sink. She looked up at me through the mirror, her eyes sparkling with lighthearted mischief. “Fast, Seb. We’re losing sunlight!”

I caught her by the waist as she tried to dart past me, pulling her back against my chest. She let out a small, breathless laugh, her hands coming up to rest over mine.

“We have all day,” I whispered into her ear, resting my chin on her shoulder. “No phones, no work, no rushing.”

She quieted down, leaning back into me. It was rare for us to get a stretch of uninterrupted time like this. The last three weeks had been a blur of late nights at my office and double shifts at her clinic, leaving us with brief, exhausted kisses in the hallway and half-remembered conversations over lukewarm takeaway.

Being here, standing in the bright morning light, watching her off-key happiness, this was the real stuff. The ordinary, quiet moments had somehow become the absolute best parts of my life.

The Spring Flower Festival was a sprawling, chaotic sea of life.

Instead of taking her to a packed amusement park or a sterile museum, I had driven us thirty minutes out of the city to the botanical park. The air smelled rich and sweet, a mixture of crushed mint, blooming hyacinths, warm pavement, and fried sugar from the row of food stalls lining the brick pathways.

Families strolled past with double strollers; street musicians plucked lazily at acoustic guitars under the shade of massive oak trees; and everywhere you looked, vibrant bursts of red, purple, and gold spilled over garden walls.

Helena was in her absolute element.

She couldn’t walk ten paces without stopping. One second she was leaning over a bed of midnight-blue irises to smell them, and the next she was dragging me by the hand toward a vendor selling fresh lemonade.

“Look at these, Seb! Have you ever seen tulips this shade of purple? They look fake!”

“They’re very purple,” I agreed softly, letting her pull me along.

Truthfully, I barely noticed the tulips. I barely noticed the grand gardens, the manicured arches, or the hundreds of people bustling around us. I was entirely, unapologetically distracted by her. I watched the way the dappled sunlight played across her neck, the way her hand felt warm and perfectly fitted in mine, and the pure, unfiltered delight that lit up her face every time she found something new.

We were standing near a stone fountain in the central plaza when it happened.

A small boy, no older than five or six, came running down the cobblestone path ahead of us. He was clutching a small, crumpled paper bouquet of pink carnations and yellow daisies, his eyes fixed on a nearby ice cream cart. He caught his foot on an uneven stone, tumbled forward, and landed hard on his hands and knees.

The bouquet flew from his grip, landing squarely in a muddy puddle left behind by the morning sprinklers. The brown paper dissolved instantly, ruining half the blossoms.

The boy sat up, scraped knees ignored, staring at the soggy, ruined flowers. His lower lip began to tremble violently.

“Grandma’s flowers…” he sobbed softly to himself.

Before I could even process what had happened, Helena was already moving.

She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t care that her yellow dress brushed against the dusty stones as she knelt directly in the dirt beside him.

“Hey there, tiny human,” she said, her voice dropping into that soft, melodic tone she used whenever someone was hurting. “Whoa, that was a top-tier stunt fall. Are you okay?”

The boy sniffled, wiping his nose on his sleeve, pointing a tear-stained finger at the puddle. “I dropped ‘em. For my grandma’s birthday.”

“Ah, I see,” Helena said, inspecting the puddle with grave seriousness. She reached into the muddy water without an ounce of hesitation, fishing out two bright yellow daisies that were still dry at the top. “Well, good thing I’m a certified flower doctor.”

She wiped the stems on her own skirt, utterly unconcerned with the dirty smudges now staining her dress, and handed them to him. Then, catching my eye, she gave me a quick, conspiratorial wink.

“Come on,” she told the boy, taking his small hand. “Let’s go upgrade these.”

I stayed back, watching from a few feet away as she walked the little boy over to a nearby flower vendor. I watched her whisper something to the florist, pull a crisp twenty-dollar bill from her small cross-body bag, and hand it over. A minute later, the boy was holding a massive, fresh bouquet of bright sunflowers that were taller than his torso.

The kid’s face lit up like a Christmas tree. He gave Helena a sloppy, enthusiastic high-five and went running off toward a woman waving frantically from a bench nearby.

Helena watched him go, a soft, satisfied smile resting on her face. She brushed off her hands, entirely oblivious to the fact that she was the brightest thing in the entire park.

My chest felt tight, filled with an ache so sweet it was almost unbearable. Moments like this weren’t rare for her; she lived her life with her heart turned completely inside out, loving the world even when it didn’t ask her to.

It was the exact reason I had fallen in love with her. It was the reason I would keep falling, over and over again, for the rest of my life.

When she walked back over to me, she caught me staring.

“You’re doing it again,” she said, folding her arms and trying and failing to look stern.

“Doing what?”

“Looking at me like I’ve grown another head.”

I laughed, stepping forward into her space. I raised my hand, gently tucking a stray lock of dark hair behind her ear, my thumb brushing against the warm curve of her cheekbone.

“I’ve got about ten thousand flowers surrounding me right now,” I murmured, leaning down so only she could hear, “and somehow, you’re still the prettiest thing here.”

Helena rolled her eyes with a dramatic sigh, but she couldn’t hide the deep, flushed pink that bloomed across her cheeks brighter than any tulip in the park.

“You are such a smooth-talking liar, Sebastian,” she muttered, though she wrapped her arms around my neck anyway, pulling herself up on her tiptoes to press a fast, soft kiss to my lips. “Come on. I want to go up there.”

She pulled back and pointed toward the center of the gardens.

Rising straight out of the sea of green was the park’s main attraction: a sleek, modern observation tower made of dark steel and towering glass panels. It soared high above the treetops, offering a panoramic view of the entire festival, the surrounding forest, and the shimmering city skyline miles in the distance.

“The observation tower?” I asked, looking up at the towering glass spindle.

“Yes! Think about how the flowers look from all the way up there. It probably looks like a giant mosaic.” She grabbed my wrist, pulling me toward the entrance queue. “Please, Seb? For me?”

“You don’t have to beg,” I smiled, letting her tow me along. “I’d follow you anywhere.”

The glass elevator was smooth and quiet as it lifted us off the ground.

As we ascended, the world below expanded into a breathtaking tapestry of color. The crowded pathways shrank into tiny brown threads weaving through massive, geometric carpets of red, violet, yellow, and white. People became tiny dots moving through a painted landscape.

Helena was completely captivated. She pressed her hands against the cool glass of the enclosure, her nose almost touching the pane, her eyes wide as she drank in the horizon.

“Seb, look at the rose garden from here!” she gasped, her breath fogging the glass slightly. “It’s shaped like a heart! That is so cheesy, I love it.”

I stepped up behind her, wrapping my arms gently around her waist, drawing her back against my chest. She relaxed into me, resting her head against my shoulder.

Everyone else in the glass enclosure was looking outward, pointing at the city, taking photos of the horizon, admiring the vast engineering of the view.

I didn’t care about the horizon. I didn’t care about the city.

If someone had stopped me right then and asked me what the view looked like, I couldn’t have answered them. I never took my eyes off the woman standing in my arms. I watched the reflection of the clouds moving across her dark eyes. I felt the steady, gentle rhythm of her breathing against my ribs. I breathed in the quiet scent of her shampoo, mixed with the faint, sweet smell of the flowers she had touched earlier.

Everything I ever wanted, everything I would ever choose, was right here in my arms.

The elevator smoothly glided into the top observation deck, a wide, circular glass room suspended hundreds of feet above the earth. We stepped out onto the polished floor, walking toward the outer edge where the view stretched out toward the distant mountains.

Helena laughed, pointing out toward the far edge of the horizon where a light fog was rolling in. “Look at that, Seb! It looks like”

I smiled, reaching down to weave my fingers through hers, pulling her hand up to press a quick kiss to her knuckles.

Then, the world shattered.

A violent, deafening sound screamed through the metal structure beneath our feet.

The solid floor shuddered hard, dropping an inch in a sickening, stomach-churning jolt.

The bright overhead lights flickered wildly, hummed with a sharp electrical screech, and died, plunging the enclosed glass deck into darkness.

The giant steel cables supporting the structure groaned—a deep, metallic sound of tearing metal that vibrated straight through the soles of our shoes.

Below us, a chorus of high-pitched screams erupted from the crowd.

Helena’s hand violently tightened around mine, her laughter instantly cut short as she stumbled sideways against me.

“Seb?” she whispered, her voice laced with sudden, icy terror.

I pulled her hard against my chest as the glass walls around us began to groan under the strain.