Three years sober. One secret he'll take to his grave. Mike has done the work. He shows up, he stays clean, he's the most reliable person in a band full of men trying to be better. He has one rule left: five years sober before he lets himself want anything else. Then he meets Clarke. She's warm and funny and easy to be around, and the friendship they build feels like something he didn't know he was missing. He also knows exactly who she is — and she has no idea who he is. What he did. What he didn't do. He should stay away. He can't. When his ex reappears claiming she's sober and needing support, Mike does what he always does — he shows up. He doesn't recognize it as a relapse until he's already in too deep. And Clarke is still out there, getting closer to the truth, with no idea the man she trusts most is the one who was there the night her brother died. Slow burn. Found family. Closed door. Recovery, guilt, and the question of whether some secrets are too heavy to survive. Heidi Hutchinson was born in South Dakota and raised the exact right distance away from the Black Hills. She had an overactive imagination very early on, and wasted no time in getting most of her friends in trouble due to her unrealistic and completely ridiculous ideas. Seeing as she was so lazy and also afraid people would think she was bonkers, she didn't write down any of the story lines that played out in her daydreams. During her high school years, she took pen to paper and filled more notebooks than she is proud of with angsty, depressing, self-deprecating poetry. This led to her writing down more things: notes, ideas, character bios, plot twists that had no plot yet to twist. After years of cleaning up her own scraps of imagination with nothing solid to hold on to, she sat down and wrote the story that had been in her head the longest. Fueled by coffee and her unwavering and perfectly normal devotion to Dave Grohl, she discovered a writer living inside of her. She still lives in the Midwest, though not as close to the Black Hills as she would prefer, with her alarmingly handsome husband and their fearless child. They eat more pizza than God intended and she listens to her music the same way she lives: loudly