SYNOPSIS
Seventeen-year-old AVERY COLLINS has always lived inside her own head — sketching portraits in the margins of her notebooks, writing poetry no one is allowed to read, and navigating the hallways of Westbrook High School with a carefully maintained invisibility that suits her just fine. She has a best friend, a plan to study art in New York after graduation, and exactly zero interest in the kind of drama that consumes most of her classmates.
Then Cole Mercer walks back into town.
COLE MERCER is everything Avery is not: magnetic, reckless, and devastatingly uninterested in the feelings of others. He left Westbrook three years ago after a family tragedy that nobody talks about openly, and he has returned carrying the kind of silence that dares you to ask questions. He is the star athlete everyone expects to save the school's dying soccer program. He is the boy every girl whispers about in the bathroom. And he is, without question, the last person Avery should ever fall for.
But hearts have never been famous for their good judgment.
From their very first collision — literally, in the school hallway on the morning of Cole's return — Avery is undone. There is something in the way he looks at her, something both cold and searching, that lodges itself beneath her ribs and refuses to leave. She tries to ignore it. She sketches his face from memory and then tears the paper to shreds. She crosses the hallway to avoid him and then spends the rest of the day thinking about the exact angle of his jaw.
Cole, for his part, barely notices she exists.
When a mutual project in AP Literature forces them into close proximity, the distance between them becomes impossible to maintain. Cole is brilliant in ways nobody expects — his insights cutting and raw and real — and Avery finds herself seeing a boy who is nothing like the legend that precedes him. Cole, meanwhile, finds himself irritated by Avery in ways he cannot name. She doesn't flirt with him. She doesn't perform for his attention. She simply exists, with her sketchbook and her quiet observations and her alarming tendency to say exactly what she thinks.
And then one night, everything changes.
A secret shared in the dark. A moment of terrible honesty. A connection that cannot be undone, no matter how desperately Cole tries to undo it.
As the school year unfolds, Avery and Cole orbit each other in a dance of push and pull — of almost and not yet, of hope crushed and hope revived. Cole's walls are high and the story behind them darker than Avery ever imagined. And Avery, who has spent her whole life making herself small, must decide whether she is brave enough to take up space — to reach for something that might break her, or might be the most beautiful thing she has ever touched.
Between Every Heartbeat is a novel about first love and second chances, about the courage it takes to be seen, and about the extraordinary power of showing up — even when every instinct tells you to run.
It is an ache. It is a hope. It is, above all, a love story worth every page.
