You chose to go back and talk to the man in your apartment.

He’s bound to have answers.

You unlock the door. Your choices are few. At the last minute, you pick up a coffee mug from the side table. You can break this over his head if you have to.

When you step into the living room, the man is sitting on the sofa. “You okay, Ava?” he asks. “I have your video ready. You always felt that the best person to tell you who you were, was you.”

You sink onto the sofa. It feels comforting, like you’ve been here before.

As the man opens a laptop and starts a video, a young woman begins to talk to you. You recognize her voice.

She’s you.

“Welcome, back, Ava,” you tell yourself. “Let’s get started helping you remember who you are.”

—

CONGRATULATIONS. YOU DID THE RIGHT THING!

YOU HAVE WON AN ADVANCE READER COPY OF THE BOOK!

—

What you have just read is one of the scenes I put my main character Ava through in my new book THIS KISS.

Ava has epilepsy, a condition that causes seizures. Her particular form hits a part of the brain that stores your life memories (the hippocampus.) She can walk, talk, and read, but she doesn’t know who she is, where she’s been, and doesn’t recognize anything as being hers, even though she can name what the objects are.

I decided to write this story after my daughter Elizabeth, who was diagnosed with epilepsy at age six, was going through a period of the worst seizures of her life. At age 15, Elizabeth had a seizure at a movie theater on a class trip. I raced to the mall to find two fire trucks and a half-dozen tricked-out firefighters walking out.

They’d been there for her. She was going to have a story to tell me about them!

But she didn’t. She had no memory of the firefighters, of feeling bad, or roughly half an hour leading up to the seizure. It took a good hour for her to orient herself with a chunk of her life missing.

I started researching memory loss with seizures.

Elizabeth’s seizures did not turn out to have a long-term affect on her memory, although she never did get those firefighters back.

But looking at the medical reasons for this, I discovered quite a few people where it DID. A seizure took their memories. And not only that, it could happen over and over again.

And so my thoughts churned. What if it did? How would you love anyone? How could anybody stay in love with you?

I created Ava and Tucker to find out.

So now, you can choose YOUR next reading adventure: