My First Love — Novel Blurb --- **Some stories don't announce themselves. They begin quietly, in ordinary places — a crowded registration hall, a window, a girl standing still in the middle of noise — and by the time you understand what's happening, you're already inside them.** --- Daniel Reeves arrives at Harlow University in Boston with a simple understanding of himself: he is careful, observant, and entirely unacquainted with love. Not the real kind. Not the kind that stays when the person is no longer in your line of sight. At twenty-one, he has made a quiet peace with this — his life is organized, his intentions are clear, and Boston is far enough from Chicago to feel like a fresh start. Then, on the second day of registration week, he sees a girl standing by a window. She is not doing anything remarkable. She is simply standing with a folder against her chest, looking outside with the particular stillness of someone whose mind has gone somewhere quieter than a crowded room. He does not know her name. He does not know anything about her. But he finds, quite suddenly, that he cannot look away. Her name is Prisca Hayden. She is from Portland, Oregon. She is studying communications and media, she wants to make documentary films that change how people see situations they thought they already understood, and she thinks in complete arguments rather than fragments — a quality someone identified in her at thirteen that she has been quietly protecting ever since. She is direct without being cold, composed without being distant, and she has a way of listening that makes the person speaking feel like the only thing in the room worth paying attention to. She is, in short, unlike anyone Daniel has ever met. *My First Love* is the story of what happens next — told slowly, honestly, and in full. It is a story about two people who find each other in the ordinary architecture of a semester — the same class twice a week, a coffee shop on Harlow Avenue, a secondhand bookstore on Commonwealth, a documentary screening at a small Cambridge theatre on a cold November Saturday. It is about the particular courage required to be clear about what you want when clarity feels like exposure. About the difference between being careful and being hidden, and the moment you realize you have been doing one when you meant to do the other. Alongside Daniel and Prisca, *My First Love* is populated with the people who make a life feel inhabited. Peter Calloway — Daniel's best friend, endlessly perceptive beneath his easy humor, falling for his own unexpected someone while trying to dispense advice he is still learning himself. Abdullahi Hassan — methodical, warm in the specific way of someone who expresses care through precision, whose quiet counsel lands with the accuracy of someone who has thought about everything twice before speaking. And Dora Mitchell — Prisca's best friend, the most forthcoming person in any room she enters, whose apparent interference is always, underneath, a form of love. These are not dramatic people in dramatic circumstances. Their lives are not organized around crisis or catastrophe. They are simply young, and in Boston, and trying to build something true in the middle of everything else that a semester requires of them. And somehow that ordinariness becomes the most interesting thing — because the novel understands that real love does not arrive with fanfare. It arrives in the way someone says your name at the end of a text message. In a diagram shared without being asked. In a mark made on a map because a moment mattered and you wanted to remember that it did. *My First Love* is told with restraint and precision, in prose that matches its characters — clear-eyed, unhurried, trusting the weight of small things to carry what they carry. It does not rush toward its revelations. It earns them, the way the best relationships earn their certainty — through accumulation, through consistency, through showing up in the ordinary moments until the ordinary moments become the whole story. For anyone who has ever stood at a fork in a path and watched someone walk away smiling and known, in the specific quiet of that moment, that something had begun that would not easily end — this novel is for you. For anyone who has ever written two words at the top of a blank page not entirely knowing why, and found that those two words were enough to carry them forward into everything that followed — this novel is for you. For anyone who has ever been found, unexpectedly, in a year that had a different plan entirely — this novel is most certainly for you. --- *Twenty marks on a map. Every one of them true.* *This is how it begins.*