Malcomb Erikson has spent years outrunning a grief he refuses to name. Since the crash that killed his best friend, he has filled his life with everything that can be survived and nothing that has to last: white-water rivers, alpine descents, relationships he leaves before they can hold him, while the steadier life he once promised himself drifts further out of reach. The one person he can't outrun is Emma, the love rooted in a shared childhood, who has stopped waiting and begun building a careful, deliberate future with someone else.

Across the ocean, Niamh Doherty leaves a volatile home in Belfast for the reinvention America seems to promise. She builds a career, a foothold, a version of herself she can stand to be, and finds, slowly, that the patterns she came so far to escape have followed her.

When Malcomb's unresolved guilt pulls these three lives into the same orbit, closeness proves as dangerous as any river or ridgeline. All three have learned to choose the familiar over the true, the survivable over the real. As the past presses in, each must decide whether to keep making that choice or to face what they have long refused to see: that some losses were never accidents, and some damage cannot be undone.

An unsparing, humane debut about love, avoidance, and the stories we tell to keep from breaking.