Chapter One
Jack Cameron probably isn’t cheating on me, but one can never be too sure.
At least, that’s the thought running on a loop in the back of my mind as I shuffle, bleary-eyed, through the airport. How the hell are there humans in this universe who consider themselves morning people?
The airport at 4:00 a.m. is a lawless place—evidenced by the fact that the sun hasn’t even peeked over the horizon yet and I can already see a businessman in a tailored suit barking into his phone at whatever poor soul is on the other end. Nearby, a sleepy-looking woman is perched on a barstool sucking down a Bloody Mary like her life depends on it. And a few feet from where she sits, a rumpled-looking girl in a faded Loyola University sweatshirt is spread out on the floor, snoring peacefully, using her carry-on duffel as a pillow. The only unifying factor among the three is that they’ve made it past the dreaded airport security line, which I’m still inching my way through, staring at them enviously from the other side of the metal detectors.
With nothing better to do, I check my phone one more time, hoping a text has materialized. While it’s obscenely early on the East Coast, it’s not even midnight in Honolulu, so there’s no reason Jack should be ignoring my message.
Or the fifty messages I sent before this throughout the week.
Going for broke, I pull up his contact and hit the call button one more time, crossing my fingers. It rings for an entire minute before the voicemail clicks on.
“Hi, you’ve reached Jack Cameron. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you. Thanks!”
I hang up, dejected. While my boyfriend and I have never been the attached-at-the-hip type, we still manage to communicate every day—whether through a brief phone call, sporadic texts, or sharing funny memes and TikToks. But for the past seven days, I’ve barely heard from him at all. No likes on my silly stories or responses to my Snapchats, just a half-hearted text here and there. What started as a slow trickle of worry in my chest has already morphed into an all-encompassing panic.
I stare at our last messages from a week ago on my tiny screen until my eyes water—from the lack of blinking or the hurt, I’m not entirely sure.
Jack: Got a lot of studying ahead of me tonight—night, Olive.
Olive: Night, Jack. See you soon for spring break. :)
Well, maybe it’s a touch impulsive, but that’s the reason I’m hopping on a flight a whole week earlier than I originally planned. Because Jack isn’t answering me, and something feels weird, and it’s the spring of my senior year at Becker High, so it’s not like I’m really missing anything. Which is exactly why it was easy to convince Mom, the die-hard hopeless romantic, to let me move up the trip and head to the University of Hawaii a week early, using the excuse that Jack will have a bunch of exams next week and we won’t be able to spend much time together.
Maybe I forgot to mention to her that Jack has no idea I’m coming this early . . . but that’s not something I can worry about right now.
My bigger focus is that I can’t untangle the knot of worry in my stomach—because my boyfriend, a year older than me and already in the second semester of his freshman year of college, is ghosting me. I swore to my mother and my friends—and most importantly, myself—that we wouldn’t be the cliché. That what Jack and I had was more than a high school fling that would fizzle out in college. It had to be. But now here I am, with unreturned texts and unplayed voicemails and a level of anxiety steadily increasing with each passing moment.
“It was supposed to be a surprise, but I kinda told him about it already,” I semi-lied to Mom when she asked what Jack thought of my early arrival. It is going to be a surprise, but maybe not in the I’m here early; let’s spend more time together! way.
That’s the way I want it to be.
But I may not have mentioned to Jack that I was coming early.
There’s a very real possibility it’ll be more of a caught-him- in-the-act surprise. And part of me feels like I’d rather see what’s going on with my own eyes and be able to accept it at face value than over a stilted FaceTime conversation or text. I don’t have time to dwell on that, because the grumpy-looking TSA agent is already waving me forward and instructing me to drop everything in the scratched plastic bin making its way down the conveyor belt.
The trek through security is as agonizingly slow as expected. I fight down a spike of anxiety as I watch them loosely search through my backpack, probably bending the pages of my planner in the process—my meticulously organized, detailed-within-an- inch-of-its-life book that I never leave home without. Relax, Olive. It’s just an ordinary planner.
Maybe so, but this isn’t any ordinary trip.
I eventually make my way to the gate (breathing a sigh of relief that my planner is unharmed once it’s returned to me), throwing on the hood of my sweatshirt and slinking down in the uncomfortable seat at the gate’s waiting area, checking my phone the whole time for messages that I know aren’t going to be there.
At least I’ll have an answer for Jack’s weirdness in eleven hours, no matter what it is.
I just hope it’s a good one.
*
I’ve never flown on my own before—a fact that didn’t stress me out before, but now as I stand in line worrying the glossy paper of the boarding pass between my fingers, I can feel the panic starting to creep in. What if the plane crashes? Or someone gets sick? Or worst of all—what if I’m stuck next to an annoying seatmate for the next eleven hours, crushed in the middle?
The last thought makes me shudder, but at least I’m armed with several downloaded true-crime podcast episodes and have my neck pillow for what will hopefully be a very sleepy flight.
When I sprang my last-minute decision to leave early on Mom, she didn’t put up a fight. Honestly, it’s exactly what I’d expect from a woman who falls hopelessly in love with a new man every three months, morphs her life to be with him, and then realizes, as she always does, that it isn’t going to work out.
For Mom, flights—and going on spontaneous journeys in the name of love—are some of her favorite things. Instead of deterring me, as an attentive parent would, she squealed with delight and dragged her laptop to the kitchen table to help me book my ticket. When I expressed my worry about taking a direct flight—as someone who isn’t too keen on flying, it’s a long time to be trapped in a giant sky tube—she scoffed.
“Don’t be silly, Olive,” she chided me, her cherry-bright nails flying excitedly over the keyboard as she searched through airline offerings. “You’ll get there quicker if you fly direct, and the sooner you see Jack, the sooner your love story continues.”
It’s honestly a surprise she never turned into a romance writer—her missed calling. At least she has her soap operas.
The flight attendant’s chipper voice declaring, “Now boarding group B,” breaks through my thoughts, and I spring up from my seat, my heart jackhammering in my chest. It’s not the first time I’ve flown—I’ve been on a few of those making-the-trek-for-love trips with Mom—but like the hundreds of other things you start doing for yourself as an almost-high-school-graduate, it seems scarier when you’re doing it solo.
I eye the plane through the tall glass windows as I get closer to the front of the queue, unease swirling in my stomach. This isn’t the same as the first time you deposit a paycheck by yourself or go to a doctor’s appointment without your parent there. This is getting on a metal death trap in the sky and hoping it doesn’t plummet to the ground.
The gate attendant scans my boarding pass without much fanfare and ushers me forward, and I try to convince myself that my mother is standing right behind me, riffling through her purse for ChapStick or complaining loudly about forgetting her headphones at home. But it doesn’t work, because the only sound behind me is the irritated sigh of a woman in her fitted suit, tapping her toe impatiently at how slowly the line is moving. I almost want to spin around and ask her why she’s wearing a full suit and heels for an eleven-hour flight to Honolulu, but I bite my tongue at the last second before I can make trouble.
Eventually I reach my seat—23B, the dreaded middle but the only last-minute seat available on the flight—and settle in, catching a glare from the elderly woman sitting against the window.
“Good morning!” I chirp, a bundle of nerves, trying to make nice with the person I’m destined to sit next to for eleven hours. But she doesn’t take well to my kindness, instead sniffing haughtily and sticking her nose back into her glossy gossip magazine, making it clear I’m going to be ignored for the duration of this trip.
Fine with me. I shove my backpack under the seat in front of me and pop in my earbuds, slinking low in my chair and queueing up the first of the true-crime podcasts I have on deck. Not that I think I’ll be listening to them for long—I’m already yawning uncontrollably, and the sky is turning a dusky pink through Cranky Lady’s window, which reminds me I’ve basically been up all night.
I glance next to me at the aisle seat—still empty. The TV screen in front of me tells me the flight’s due to take off in ten minutes. I mentally cross my fingers that the poor soul misses their flight, because this seat being empty means after takeoff I can scoot over there and put a buffer between me and my hostile seatmate. The odds look promising, but we still have some time to wait, so I fire off a text to Mom to let her know we’re leaving soon, switch my phone into airplane mode, and press play on my podcast while closing my eyes.
A couple of minutes go by, and I’m being lulled to sleep by the gruesome reenactment of a woman being brutally stabbed and disposed of by her lover, when some rustling in the aisle gets my attention. I pop my eyes open and blearily blink at the bright lights, watching a woman skirt by with three young (whining, cranky) children in tow, making their way down the row. Luckily, none of them slide into seat 23C, which elicits a sigh of relief.
The pilot’s voice crackles overhead, and I pause my podcast to listen. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. The time is five-forty-five a.m. local time here at JFK, and we’ll be closing the doors and departing for Honolulu shortly. Please fasten your seat belts and prepare for takeoff. Thank you.”
Still no seatmate. Perfect. I straighten up and make sure my bag is correctly stowed underneath the seat in front of me, accidentally jostling Cranky Lady in the process. She clears her throat loudly, and I count down the seconds until the door is sealed and I can slide one seat over, away from her snark, at least marginally.
There’s more rustling at the front of the plane, the flight attendants moving aside to let someone pass, but I can’t see over the sea of heads in front of me. Even Cranky Lady perks up, curious, before furrowing her brow and diving back into her magazine.
Copyright © 2026 by Jessica L. Cozzi. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
