Things I Never Told You

Everyone carries something they've never said aloud. Darlan Darlan carries more than most.

Things I Never Told You is his reckoning - told in the quiet hours of a road trip that neither he nor Héctor asked for, in the dark hallways of a farmhouse in the middle of the night, in the weight of twenty-three tattoos and the one year he spent away that neither of them has named. It is the book in which the architecture of Dark's silence finally begins to crack.

He knows what he is. He's always known. The possessiveness, the violence, the instinct that doesn't ask permission - it lives in his blood the same way it lived in his father's. But there are things Héctor doesn't know: what really happened to Jhonata after the graduation dance. What Darlan traded to make sure Héctor could sleep at night. How many years he spent performing restraint so that the person who mattered most would never have to see what he was capable of.

When they arrive at the farmhouse and a shadow moves through the kitchen, Héctor reaches for Darlan without thinking - and Darlan places himself between the threat and that small, furious body without thinking either. Some truths live in the body long before the mouth finds words for them.

Things I Never Told You is a novel about what it means to protect someone from what you are - and the moment you realize the protection has cost more than you can sustain.