Helen's Song

Helen Chen grew up at the tip of Cape Cod with a piano teacher who taught her that music could float, a golden retriever named Debussy with a lobster-theft record at three restaurants, and a best friend no one else could hear.

Because the silver bracelet Debussy dug out of the sand isn't jewelry. It's Luna - a consciousness far older than the Earth, who has spent that long existence being found, worn, used, and forgotten. Helen is the first person who ever asked Luna what she wanted. That one question turns a girl and a miracle into something rarer than either: friends.

Luna can heal. But every healing costs her a piece of herself - so together they make a rule: small things only, unless it's life or death. Then, in Helen's senior year, a routine blood test comes back wrong, and the rule stops being a rule and becomes the question their whole friendship was built to answer.

What follows is a year of hospital Tuesdays and borrowed dresses, of a dog who breaks into buildings to find her, of friends who show up and one who honestly can't, of a stranger's cells arriving in a bag too small to hold a whole future - and of a gift given in secret to a piano teacher who will spend the rest of her long life almost asking the question she can never quite say out loud.

Told in Helen's own voice - one chapter, one memory, one song at a time - Helen's Song is a story about what love actually costs, and who gets to choose to pay it. Bring tissues. Then hand it to someone you love.

Written in loving memory of Sadie Frances Galio and LCDR Henry A. Galio Jr., the author's parents.