Prologue: The Goddess Next Door

Everyone envied me for having a gentle, beautiful older sister—a real goddess and the top student in school.

In our small, leafy Ohio suburb, neighbors gossiped over white picket fences, and somehow, Summer Lynn’s name always crept into those conversations. Teachers, neighbors, even the barista at Main Street Coffee called her a prodigy, a stunner—like she was plucked right from some Hollywood coming-of-age movie and dropped into our cul-de-sac. To everyone else, she was perfect. To me, she was complicated, sometimes cruel, sometimes the only person who really saw me.

But no one knew that, on those secret, sweltering summer nights, almost all my firsts—my first secrets, my first fears, even my first real heartbreak—belonged to her.

Only the air-conditioning’s low hum and the faded baseball posters on my wall bore witness to the weird, bittersweet territory of those early days—like the first time I let someone hold my hand or whispered a secret I couldn’t trust to anyone else.

In the end, she sneered and said she’d ruin my whole life, not realizing her own had already been ruined by me.

The threat didn’t come with fireworks or family drama. It was more like a cold wind through a half-open window in August—a warning you only feel when it’s too late. By then, the damage was done—only neither of us knew who had hurt whom more.