She has six months. He has seventeen years of regret.

Ellie Morgan has stopped pretending she's going to beat it.

Stage IV pancreatic cancer doesn't negotiate. It offers timelines. Six months, maybe less. So Ellie makes a decision: no more aggressive treatment. No more pretending. Just whatever time she has left - honest and unvarnished.

She expects exhaustion. Pain. Silence.

She does not expect her estranged sister to come home after twelve years of running.

And she definitely does not expect Owen Barrett - the boy who loved her first and left her hardest - to walk back into her life asking for a second chance he doesn't deserve.

Owen has spent seventeen years becoming the kind of man who knows how to sit beside the dying. He's an ER doctor now. He understands loss. What he doesn't understand is how to look at Ellie and not see everything he threw away.

Ellie refuses to be handled gently. She refuses to carry anyone else's grief along with her own. If Owen wants to be part of her final chapter, it won't be as a hero. It will be as something harder: honest.

As old wounds reopen and unfinished love resurfaces, Ellie must decide what matters more - protecting her heart from another fracture, or allowing herself to feel something real before it's too late.

A tender, unsentimental story about second chances, sisterhood, and what it means to stay when leaving would be easier.

Perfect for readers of quiet, emotionally intelligent contemporary fiction where love doesn't fix everything - but it still matters.