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.

The space between us felt impossibly small. And still, he didn't touch me. Just looked at me like I was something breakable. Like one wrong move would shatter everything he'd been trying to hold together.


"I didn't want to," he said again, softer this time. Like he meant it more than he should have.


And then I said the thing I'd never let myself say out loud.


His jaw tensed slightly. But he didn't look away.


"I knew," I said again. "Even back then. I may have been fourteen, but I wasn't stupid. I knew things were getting worse with your dad. I knew you were barely holding it together."


He exhaled like he'd been waiting years to hear someone say it.


"You never said anything," he murmured.


"What was I supposed to say? 'Hey, Callum, I know your ribs are probably bruised and you flinch every time someone raises their voice — but could you stay and break my heart in person instead of disappearing into the night?'"


His mouth twitched like he wanted to smile, but couldn't.


I looked down at my hands. "You didn't owe me anything. And part of me—part of me was glad you left. Because I was scared you wouldn't if someone didn't make you."


"Leaving was the only way I knew how to survive," he said finally. "I thought if I got out, if I stayed gone long enough, everything I left behind would be better off."


"You really thought I would be better off without you?"


"I had to," he said. "Otherwise, I would've come back."


The cold didn't matter anymore. The parking lot, the lights, the dull thrum of pop music bleeding through the walls — none of it felt real. Just him. Just this.


He hesitated. And then, almost too quietly to hear:


"Because I couldn't not know you anymore."


My chest tightened so suddenly it hurt.


I wasn't sure what to do with that sentence.


So I said the only true thing I could find.


His eyes closed. Just for a second. Like the words physically landed.


"I missed you too," he said. "Every day."


Chapter 16 - Callum