No Past

The rule was no past. Two people who agreed to be strangers despite everything they shared. It was supposed to be easier than the truth.
shared trauma · second chance · brother's best friend · dual timeline · forced proximity · angsty NA · heat level: 4/5

Sienna has a new apartment, a new city, and exactly one rule: no looking backward. She was supposed to leave all of it behind — the small Oregon town, the summer she tried to forget, the boy who was her older brother's best friend and the first person who made her understand why people write poems.

Then he moves into the Bellwood.

Nico Andrade doesn't know what to say to Sienna Park. He knew her when they were seventeen — when he spent one summer loving her in the particular, irreversible way of young people who don't know what they're destroying. He knows why she's been avoiding him for eight years. He knows what he carries. He's not going to bring it into her door.

They make a rule. No past. They're strangers. Whatever happened in Shelter Cove, Oregon, stays in Shelter Cove, Oregon. They can be neighbors. They can be fine.

She can hear him in the kitchen below, learning the sounds of her building. She recognizes his movements. She memorized them at seventeen, the summer before everything broke. The rule is already in trouble.

Dual-timeline structure: Sienna narrates the present from her apartment in the Bellwood. Nico's past chapters are fragments of that summer — the friendship, the falling, the drowning they couldn't prevent and will never stop trying to.

Tropes: secret shared history · fresh start romance · second chance (inverted) · forced proximity · dual timeline · he falls first

Content warnings: Drowning death of a sibling (off-page, past timeline), survivor's guilt, explicit sexual content, grief.

Book 2 of The Rules We Break. Can be read as a complete standalone. HEA guaranteed.