Bella Swan is four hours from marrying Edward Cullen when Jasper Whitlock comes through her window at half past four in the morning and tells her the truth: she was never Edward’s mate. She was his. What follows isn’t a rescue. It’s a runaway bride, a thousand miles of open road, and a girl who spent a year being told what she felt finally learning to say it out loud. How Am I Supposed to Live Without You is a story about the difference between…

Once upon a time, a girl was left in the woods because she wasn’t enough. She was wrong about almost everything that night, that girl, and so was he—but she got one thing right without knowing it: the woods were the place where the truth about her worth would be settled. It just took the right witnesses. It took a family that gathers, and a key cut on purpose, and a sound made for exactly one person, and twenty years of a man saying…

She opened the locker and knew immediately. It hadn’t been there before. The paper sat folded, deliberate, like it had been placed by someone who understood exactly how long she would take to notice. Bella didn’t reach for it right away. She just stood there, aware she wasn’t alone….

He had not meant to think of her. That was the truth of it. Honest and simple. He had come for the road. For the pause before motion. For the space between leaving and arriving. But she had a way of finding him in those spaces….

“She liked that about him. She liked a lot of things about him. The thought arrived without warning, warm and certain, and Bella felt her cheeks flush before she could stop it. At her feet, something rustled. The small fern growing between two rocks at the edge of the clearing was growing. Visibly. Its fronds unfurled in slow, deliberate spirals, stretching upward like fingers reaching for sunlight. Bella stared at the fern, then slowly looked at Mabs. Mabs sat perfectly still on her…

Bella told herself she wasn’t looking for him. She typed another sentence on her blog, paused, deleted it, and glanced toward the stage lights warming against the evening sky. Echo shifted under the café table, ears flicking at the distant sound of a guitar being tuned. It wasn’t even his set yet. Still, Bella felt it — that pull. The awareness of him somewhere nearby. Jasper Whitlock didn’t enter a space quietly, even when he tried. It was in the way the air tightened. The way…