FINN
Everybody had a first: the first kiss, the first hug, the first love. Mine were different, though.
They weren’t about moments that pass or milestones carved in romance. Every first I’d ever experienced, the agonies and thrills of them all, were bound up with Maya, stitched into my life like a seam I couldn’t tease apart.
Maya was my everything, though she had never known it.
I was 10 years old when my mother died. I drowned in grief so deep I could hardly breathe. For days, I sat in my room, looking at the wall, lost in the void of her abrupt absence. She’d gone to the pack hospital to have my baby brother, but she never came back. My father was similarly overtaken by his own grief, barely able to meet my eyes, let alone offer any comfort. His responsibilities as Beta of the Ash
