Shattered into a million pieces, and that’s just how she’d like it to stay.
She doesn’t believe she deserves happiness. She doesn’t understand how to move on while her life is falling apart and her reality is destroyed.
Enter Eli Park.
Eli is someone Haley thought she knew, but who turned out to be so much more than she remembered. He sees through her pain and refuses to be pushed away, even when she lashes out.
Eli’s patience is both frustrating and surprising. Haley was so sure she wanted to go on feeling nothing, but Eli stirs emotions she can’t deny.
Will Haley allow Eli to help her through this horrific time so she can find herself again? Or will she lose the only person who can help heal her heart?
~*~
I swung back and forth for a while, letting the breeze settle my nerves. I don’t know how long I was out there for, but eventually, I heard a car pull up. The door shut and footsteps thumped up the stairs.
“Hello,” a masculine voice drifted towards me.
I opened my eyes and was greeted with crystal blue eyes, messy brown hair, a lopsided smirk and six feet of tall, lean man.
“Er…um…hi,” I croaked out. Okay…the man was gorgeous. Pretty sure I was blushing.
“Haley?” gorgeous mystery man asked.
I nodded. I didn’t know who this guy was, but he seemed to know me. And if I opened my mouth to ask him, I’m sure I would sound like an idiot again.
He gave me that adorable lopsided grin again. “Eli.” He pointed at himself, like I should know who he was. Eli was leaning against the porch railing, staring at me with amusement in his eyes. Maybe if he wasn’t so damn attractive I could get my brain to start working again. But for now, I could only stare.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” he asked. “The four of us hung out together when I roomed with Noah in the dorms.”
Holy shit. This man in front of me couldn’t be Noah’s roommate. There was no possible way he was the same guy. I hung out with the kid all the time, and this guy…no, not him. Not him at all.
“You look nothing like you did freshman year.” I blurted out. Then quickly turned red and clamped my hand over my mouth.
Oh God, he’s going to think you are the biggest idiot.
Eli laughed. “I was a lot scrawnier back then. Had longer hair. Wore thick framed glasses all the time.” His voice still sounded the same. That was something at least. “When I moved back home to help my mom, I worked with my uncle at his construction company. I guess that helped me gain a little muscle.” He shrugged like he was not confident with how he looked.
The more I stared at him, the more he was becoming familiar. Freshman year, he was this quiet, slightly nerdy kid. He always wore comic book t-shirts. He had spent most of his time on his computer or playing video games with Noah. Kyler had kept telling me that he had a crush on me, and she even begged me to go out with him a few times, but I always came up with reasons I couldn’t. Mostly those excuses dealt with my crush at that time—Drew. Blah. I was so not going to think about that douche when Eli was standing in front of me.
I mean, I enjoyed hanging out with him as a friend, but dating? He was definitely not what I thought my type was. Though, what I thought my type was turned out to be a bunch of jerks, so maybe I should have given the nice guy a chance.
“You okay?” he asked gently, pushing off the railing and taking a seat next to me on the swing. “You seem lost in thought.”
I shrugged, not knowing what to say.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” “Oh no, I do.”
~*~
Writing Can Be Therapy
There are two things I hear most when people talk about Love Found.
1.Cancer is such a touchy subject, why on Earth would you write about it?
2.You wrote about it so beautifully, you must have first-hand knowledge on the subject.
Statement one is true.
Cancer is a topic most people shy away from. It seems as though it’s almost taboo to talk about in public, even though it’s everywhere and has affected so many. But still, you don’t talk about cancer. You just don’t.
And you definitely don’t write a book where the main character is dealing with her mom dying.
Nobody will read that stuff.
But you know what, I needed to write this book. I didn’t care about it being a taboo subject, I didn’t care that chances were a lot of people who read Choose Us weren’t going to read Love Found. All I cared about was writing this story.
It was a sort of therapy for me.
Because you see, the second statement is also true.
I lost my mom to cancer when I was ten years old. All of my childhood and all that I remember about her revolved around cancer. And I am 100% sure I kept feelings about that buried for many years.
This is the story my brain needed me to write. And I don’t think I realized just how much I needed to write it, until I was almost done.
I wouldn’t go as far to say this story was semi-autobiographical, because Haley is way cooler than I ever was and my life has zero parallels with hers, except for the mom thing.
But I would say, this is what I would have wanted to happen, had I lost my mom at 22 and not 10.
As a ten year old, you don’t really grasp everything that is going on….and you definitely don’t grasp the reality of everything in your life that will happen without your mom there.
When you’re ten, it’s even hard to grasp on to the fact that your mom is dying.
And of course, I kept any feeling buried deep.
Love Found was an ode to everything that I missed out on. It was everything I wish I could have done/said to my mom before she passed.
It was my mind playing out what I would have done if I was older and given the time to say goodbye.
But this is also two-fold now. Not only was I writing it from a daughter’s perspective, but I also wrote it from a mother’s view. How would I want my daughter to deal if I was dying? What advice would I give to her, knowing I only had a few moments like that left? How to make sure my daughter won’t shut people out and pretend to be strong on her own?
So while writing this book was therapeutic for me, I also had the hope that someone who was maybe in the same situation would pick it up, and maybe in some small way it could help them cope with everything that was happening in their life.
If there is one thing I learned from my mom’s death, is that it does get better. And you are capable of moving on with your life.
Born and raised in the frozen tundra of Wisconsin, Caylie fell in love with reading at a young age. With her lively imagination, she created numerous stories in her head throughout her childhood and teenage years.
Her first novel, Choose Us, released in April 2014 and became an Amazon Bestseller.
When she isn't slaving away at the keyboard, Caylie is an avid reader, and lover of coffee... copious amounts of coffee. She also has an unhealthy addiction to coffee mugs, chapstick, water bottles, football, and tv shows--binge watching is her favorite.
She chases her two kids around the house all day, and has a husband whom she adores.
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