Memory is everything.
After an injury in the ring, amateur boxer Leith Wenz wakes to discover his most recent memories are three years out of date. Struggling to face his new reality, Leith must cope with painful revelations about his family. His brother is there to support him, but it’s the unfamiliar face of Zach, a man introduced as his best friend, that provides the calm he craves. Until Zach’s presence begins to stir up feelings Leith can’t explain.
For Zach, being forgotten by his lover is excruciating. He carefully hides the truth from Leith to protect them both from additional pain. His bottled-up turmoil finds release through vlogging, where he confesses his fears and grief to the faceless Internet. But after Leith begins to open up to him, Zach's choices may come back to haunt him.
Ultimately, Leith must ask his heart the questions memory can no longer answer. If memory is everything. Can love survive when the memory of it is gone?
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What Reviewers Are Saying...
"Leta Blake is fast becoming one of the most exciting new voices in the romance genre." - I'm With Geek Reviews
"Raw, beautiful, lyrical, painful, sensual, hopeful. This author gets inside all of it and then lays it open, exposed, for us. The writing. The dialogue. The characters. The love. They're all here. I recommend this to everyone." - Prism Book Alliance
Excerpt
Memory, as it turned out, was both everything and nothing. It had no substance, no form, no weight, and no color. It was described, in technical terms, as deposits of proteins within cells of the brain. However, these were words that at their heart were as mysterious and ultimately magical as any other metaphor used in an attempt to understand the concept: memory as a storehouse or set of books—a way to keep track of life’s checks and balances; or memory as meaning—a mode of life, and a way of being.About Leta Blake
Leith knew now that all these metaphors and all these words boiled down to one thing: memory is the sum of us, the total, and if it is divided, then we are lost.
There were other people in the occupational therapy ward, and Leith studied them with a mixture of horror and envy. There was the droopy, sagging stroke victim Jan Troxell, who could tell anyone the weather report from that morning, but couldn’t remember anything else—not her daughter’s name, not her age, and not her favorite color.
There was David Mueller, for whom every day began as April 12, 2006, until he found out again, and again, and again that he had suffered a brain injury and couldn’t make any more memories.
In some ways these people repulsed Leith, leaving him breathless with terror and disgust at how close he’d come to joining their ranks. People who were shells of the beings they were before, empty and unable to give anything back to the world except for the memory that once they were more, and that they never would be again.
But in other equally scary ways, Leith watched these people with envy. They were free, utterly rudderless in a thrashing ocean, but still free. Their options had been removed from them, and they were at the mercy of the elements and the grace of people’s kindness. But they weren’t tied down to memories of who they were, of what and who they’d loved, the things they’d once dreamed, and the things they’d valued.
Leith was not free. He knew who he was, give or take the last three years of his life. It had been almost two weeks since he’d come out of the coma. The illegal blow to the back of his head during the New York Amateur Boxing Championship match had cost his opponent his career, but it had cost Leith a hell of a lot more than that.
His last memory was learning that he would soon be released from prison. In his sparse, clean cell, he’d sat on a bunk and composed a letter to Arthur asking if it would be all right to start over in Brooklyn instead of going home to New Jersey and their father.
Leith had no memory of finishing that letter. No memory of a bus trip from the jail in Florida to Arthur’s apartment in Manhattan. No memory of meeting a girl named Naomi on the ski slopes of Vermont. No memory of his father’s death and no memory of mourning by his dad’s grave. Leith only knew of these things because he’d been told. And he still didn’t know how to believe them.
While Leta Blake would love to tell you that writing transports her to worlds of magic and wonder and then safely returns her to a home of sparkling cleanliness and carefully folded laundry, the reality is a bit different. Instead, piles of laundry and forgotten appointments haunt her life, but the joy of writing and the thrill of finishing a book make the everyday chaos all worth it.
Leta’s educational and professional background is in psychology and finance, respectively, but her passion has always been in writing, and she most enjoys crafting romance stories that she would like to read. At her home in the Southern U.S., Leta works hard at achieving balance between her day job, her writing, and her family.
