Seven Stages Of Love
For ten years, Amiliya "Ami" Reyes has lived by a single, unshakable truth: the boy who killed her family bought his way out of consequences, and one day she would make him answer for it. She was eleven when a car crash on Route 9 took her parents and younger brother — and left sixteen-year-old Levi Cross, son of a billionaire CEO, as the only survivor behind the wheel. The story vanished from the news within days, the settlement buried under legal language, the boy's name quietly protected by everything his family's money could arrange.
Now twenty-one, poor, and running on three jobs and no sleep, Ami takes a drafting position at Cross Industries for one reason: to find the last piece of proof she needs before her decade of quiet investigation runs out of road. She doesn't expect to be assigned directly to Levi — cold, controlling, and utterly unaware of who she really is. She definitely doesn't expect to fall for him.
What neither of them knows is that Levi has spent the same ten years believing something that isn't true. He has no memory of driving that night — only fragments, guilt, and a story he was handed in a hospital bed at sixteen by a father who has spent a decade making sure his son never asked the one question that would unravel everything: *what actually happened in the rain on Route 9?*
As hatred gives way to attachment, and attachment gives way to a love neither of them can control, the ground beneath both of them begins, slowly, to shift. A fabricated betrayal tears them apart. A decade-old lie starts to come apart from the inside when Levi, alone, finally forces himself to read the file he's spent ten years too afraid to open. And when the truth threatens to surface for good, someone with everything to lose decides that the one witness who could destroy it all needs to disappear — the same way, on the same kind of night, as the family she's never stopped grieving.
*The Seven Stages Of Love* moves through the seven traditional stages of love — attraction, attachment, love, reverence, worship, madness, and the death of ego — as a romance, a psychological mystery, and a reckoning collide. It is a story about the difference between guilt and truth, the lies families tell to survive themselves, and two people who have to burn down everything they believed about each other — and about themselves — before they can build something real.