Prologue

Secrets.

They're always there, looming like dark, foreboding shadows behind their keeper. The ones we fear to voice the most are always the ones that find a way out in the open. They taunt and tease us, forever on the tips of our tongues. They wait there; they want to be said aloud.

Sometimes the weight of the secret is too much. Sometimes, just sometimes, we cave in from the pressure that crushes down our shoulders from the heavy burden we carry in our minds. Not all of us have the will power to keep a secret to ourselves. Not all of us can get past the thing that troubles us on our own.

My guess was that it all came down to timing. Whether you felt it was the right time to speak up; whether the person that deserved to know what you'd been keeping from them was ready to hear it; whether you met someone you could confide in at just the right moment. Someone who gave you an alternative route rather than letting you continue the secretive one you had been walking down for almost the entirety of your life and who offered their helping hand to get you out of that mess; who dragged you out of the choppy sea you had been drowning in for so long until you were safely back on the shoreline, the warm sand sitting comfortably between your toes.

I knew what carrying a secret was like. I was living in one. One huge, dreadful secret that I couldn't escape and couldn't make disappear. I had been broken in a way that I couldn't describe and though I may have seemed fine on the outside, on the inside I was a shattered vase that had been sloppily put back together again, cracked beyond repair with some shards missing and others not in their rightful place. I was a mess, still trying in vain to find my lost pieces.

Little did I know that the beginning of junior year would change me in more ways than I had ever expected. And who knew that it would only take one very persistent individual to help me retrieve the fragments that I thought had been lost forever.