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When the Stars Forgot to Shine

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Chapter 1 - PROLOGUE

From the novel: "When the Stars Forgot to Shine"

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Three things Emma Monroe doesn't talk about:

1. Her father.

2. Her poetry.

3. The night she stopped believing in happy endings.

It had been 742 days since her dad left for a drive and never came back.

The car was found on the side of Highway 18, door wide open, keys still in the ignition. But no blood. No signs of struggle. Just a worn-down photograph of Emma as a child, taped to the dashboard like it was supposed to explain everything.

She stopped asking questions after month four. Stopped crying after month seven.

By month twelve, she'd learned how to disappear in plain sight.

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The prologue opens in a quiet attic lit only by a flickering bulb and dust-filtered sunset light. Emma sits cross-legged on a wooden floor, wearing a hoodie three sizes too big and flipping through an old notebook — the kind with coffee-stained pages and poetry she'll never show anyone.

> "I do not miss him anymore.

I miss who I thought he was."

She scribbles it out before the ink dries.

There's a picture of her dad taped to the wall behind her. She never looks at it directly — only through the mirror that hangs next to it, cracked and slightly tilted. It's easier that way.

Downstairs, her mom laughs too loudly with the man she's started seeing.

The sound makes Emma flinch.

She closes the notebook.

Shoves it beneath a loose floorboard.

Stands up.

> "No more poems," she says out loud, like a promise.

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That's when the wind picks up, rattling the windowpane. The trees outside sway like they're whispering. The kind of night where something shifts — not in the sky, but inside a person.

She doesn't know it yet.

But tomorrow morning, a boy named Ryan Carter will walk into her first-period art class.

And the stars, even the ones she forgot how to wish on…

are about to start shining again.