“I am the ghost that haunts my dreams. It’s pathetic, really, to be the monster of my own nightmares. Next to you is the only place I feel safe…”

Nineteen year old Adam has just failed a suicide attempt. He wants to win back the trust of his strained family. His father hardly speaks anymore, and his overworked mother abuses painkillers. Most of all Adam wants to help Evelyn, his young sister who last saw him on the floor of his bedroom with a gun to his head. Now he sits in the office of an ambitious young psychologist named Richard White. Their prepaid appointments are running out, but Adam is counting on Richard to help him connect with all he’s lost.

But then one day, Adam’s life changes completely. He falls desperately in love with Cherith, a quirky teenage girl in the waiting room. But once Adam learns she’s been diagnosed with cancer, he starts to suffer from vivid nightmares. When Cherith’s condition declines, Adam’s dreams change along with her, from a misty purgatory world made of lost souls and dead stars, to the radiant beauty of space and the violet skies and red grass blades of what could be heaven. As reality blurs, Adam just wants to see Evelyn again and keep a promise he made to Cherith on Valentine’s night: that he will find her in the afterlife if she dies, and nothing, not even death, can keep them from being together. He just may find that his dreams are the answer he’s looking for.

VALENTINE is a novel that I’m currently working on.