Page 1 of This Changes Everything

Prologue

VANCOUVER 20 years old

“ELLIE, WHAT DID WE DO?” RORY’S HEAD WAS ON MY SHOULDER. His face was buried in my collarbone. His loose dark curls plastered against my cheek, clinging to my skin in the same mindless, desperate hold that my limbs were clinging to him.

I stopped breathing, and my eyes flew open. I must have misheard him.

Rory’s hot breath steamed my neck. We were in the passenger seat of his musty, old black Jeep Cherokee, and it dawned on me that all my parents needed to do was look out my sister’s second-story bay window to find me and Rory Campbell, tangled up and naked, perfectly lit under the streetlight that loomed at the end of our driveway. The passenger seat was reclined all the way down, and I didn’t know how he wasn’t suffocating as he pushed his face even further into my neck. Our thrashing heartbeats bashed against each other in unison.

“What did you say?” I asked. He didn’t answer, so I repeated myself. “Rory, what did you say?” He didn’t move, but I felt his lips tremble against my skin, and I had to actively stop myself from filling his Jeep with vomit. Why wasn’t he talking to me?

“What’s going on?” Tears started materializing in my eyes. “Look at me,” I pleaded. I could hear my voice getting weaker the longer he hid his face.

When Rory eventually lifted his head, his pained expression burned through me. My eyes trailed over the faint freckles across the bridge of his nose and the tops of his cheeks. I called it his Summer Skin and had obsessed over his soft, subtle freckles, which multiplied under the summer sun, since we were twelve. In eight years, I could count on one hand how many times Rory Campbell and I had purposefully touched each other, and touching him so intimately now, with what we had just done, combined with that look on his face, felt like both a dream and a nightmare. He kept his eyes closed and lightly touched his nose to mine.

“Look at me. Please,” I begged.

He opened his sad, coffee-brown eyes, which I had memorized long ago, and then quickly squeezed them shut again as tears rolled down his cheeks. He kissed me softly. I assumed the kiss was to stop his bottom lip from quivering, but it didn’t work. When I heard him inhale a choppy breath, I asked more urgently, “What’s wrong?”

“This was a mistake.” He dropped his head as if he had lost all the muscles in his neck.

“What?” I blinked. There was no way he could possibly have said—

“This was a mistake,” he said again.

“What do you mean?” My heartbeat filled my head, clouding my hearing with its heavy thumping.

“We shouldn’t have done that . . .”

“You’re still inside me, Rory.” I swallowed, entirely unable to comprehend what was happening.

With a sudden surge of energy, Rory tore himself off me and quickly shuffled over to the driver’s seat. He leaned down and pulled on his underwear, then his pants, then his black T-shirt over his head. I tried to do the same, but my fingers stopped working, my hands, my legs, my brain, everything.

Rory wiped his tears with the back of his hand and looked out the window, facing away from me. He looked down the dark street I grew up on.

“What did I do?” I asked, staring blankly at my sleepy house.

“Nothing. You did nothing. That was . . .” He ran both hands through his floppy hair. “You did nothing.”

“What’s happening right now?”

“Please. Ellie.” He sucked in a shallow gasp. “Stop.”

“Rory, what did I do? What is going on right now?” I must have asked one too many times, because he then slammed his hands into the steering wheel.

“You’re leaving!” Rory practically shouted at me, rocking me back in my seat with his unexpected burst of fury, lighting a fire under my ass to get my clothes on. “Tomorrow. You’re moving away tomorrow, and I feel like I’m dying!”

“It’s only two years.” I fumbled with my shirt. I couldn’t look at him.

“It’s not. You’ve wanted to leave for as long as I’ve known you. I knew it would happen, it’s finally happening, and you’re not coming back.”

“I’m coming back,” I insisted.

“No, you’re not!” Rory yelled. He closed his eyes, trying to control himself.

“It’s just school. This is my home. I will come back.”

“We both know that’s not true. I know you, Ellie. You’re leaving, and I’m going to be left with nothing.”