Elliot Hayes is twenty-one, a junior at the university, and the kind of person everyone assumes has his life together. At 6’3”, with dark-blond hair, blue-gray eyes, and a lean athletic build, he’s effortlessly attractive without seeming to care about it. He’s popular on campus, knows practically everyone, and is constantly invited somewhere. But almost none of those people actually know him. Elliot is emotionally intelligent in a way that makes him good at understanding everyone except himself. He’s calm during arguments, notices when people are uncomfortable, remembers tiny details, and can usually tell when someone is pretending they’re okay. He just can’t figure out how to make himself okay. His brain never seems to shut up. He deals with it through impulsive, self-destructive choices—staying out too late, drinking too much, throwing himself into reckless situations, anything that makes the constant noise inside his head quiet down for a little while. He’s carrying things he doesn’t talk about. Things that happened before college. Things he blames himself for. Things that have gradually convinced him that being surrounded by people isn’t the same thing as being loved. The night he meets her, Elliot is already at his breaking point. He goes to the party because being alone with his thoughts feels unbearable. And for a while, the party works. Until it doesn’t. By the end of the night, Elliot has made up his mind that he is going to take his life that night. Then he meets her. And something about that encounter interrupts the path he’d been heading down. He doesn’t tell her why. He doesn’t tell anyone. Not yet.

Lilith Mayhem is nineteen. She’s 5’2”, with naturally ginger hair, tan skin, bright blue eyes, and an almost impossibly striking appearance. She’s the kind of girl people notice the second she walks into a room. She’s also the kind of girl everyone thinks is happy. Lilith is popular. She’s funny, charismatic, loud when she wants to be, and knows how to make an entire room pay attention to her. But popularity has never made her feel less alone. Recently, Lilith lost her younger sister to cancer. Since then, everything inside her has felt unstable. She’s always struggled with her emotions, but grief has made everything sharper. Her feelings can become overwhelming incredibly quickly, and when she feels rejected, abandoned, ignored, or misunderstood, it can hurt far more intensely than other people realize. She desperately wants people close to her. Then the second someone gets too close, she becomes terrified they’re going to leave. So she pushes first. She can be affectionate one minute and distant the next. She can adore someone and then convince herself they secretly hate her. She craves reassurance but sometimes can’t accept it when it’s offered. When she’s hurt, she can become defensive, impulsive, or furious—not because she doesn’t care, but because she cares so much that rejection feels unbearable. And underneath all of it is grief. A massive, aching loneliness she doesn’t know what to do with. Lilith doesn’t actually want to die. She just desperately wants the pain to stop. And she has absolutely no idea how to say that.