What we never said
Fourteen was supposed to be an in-between year — too old for dolls, too young for love. But for Cara, it became the year everything changed.
When her brother’s best friend, Callum Adler, starts spending more time at their house, Cara notices things most adults ignore. The bruises. The quiet. The way their mother starts folding extra laundry like it’s second nature. Callum's broken home becomes a secret the whole family carries, and Cara — wide-eyed, overlooked, and quietly growing — starts to fall for him in all the ways she shouldn’t.
But Callum is four years older. Eighteen. Off-limits. Almost a man. And despite their quiet moments — the almosts, the shared glances, the night she asked to kiss him — he walks away without a goodbye, leaving her in the silence he helped create.
Years pass. Cara grows. Builds a life. Finds herself. By eighteen, she’s no longer just Kaden’s little sister. She’s her own person — confident, loved, maybe even happy. But everything tilts when she runs into Callum again at a skating rink. Older, composed, and entirely unexpected.
He’s not the same boy who used to sleep on her couch with bruises on his ribs — and she’s not the girl who watched him leave.
But unfinished things have a way of circling back.
Told in alternating perspectives of Cara and Callum, What We Never Said explores the slow burn of first love, the ache of timing, and what it really means to grow up — and grow apart — before finding your way back.
