

I trust you because I've known you for ten years longer than they have.

"For ten long years, Cynthia had loved Ethan Luciano in silence. On the night he won the national championship, he finally pulled her into his arms: “I’ll marry you the moment we graduate.” The next morning. What she heard instead was Ethan’s cocky laugh echoing among his teammates: “She was so fucking eager… legs wrapped around me the whole time, telling me she loved me. She’s a good warm-up though. Looks innocent but takes it like a pro. I’m gonna use her a few more times until I get with Sylvia.” In that moment, Cynthia’s world shattered. The boy she had loved for ten years had never loved her back. She was never his future — only his practice."

Aurelius spent a thousand solitary years on an immortal assembly line, rolling pills in paradise. A cosmic traffic incident cuts that career short and drops him into the body of James Cross, a mistreated eldest son, pressured into a humble marriage, and apparently everyone's punching bag. What Aurelius finds instead is a wife and mother-in-law who offer nothing but patience and gentle care. For someone who has never once been loved, it undoes him completely. He can't repay them with money or status. So he does the only thing he knows how—he decides to take the whole family to immortality with him.