Sometimes in life we all have moments when we realize we screwed up so badly, there’s no way out.

I’m having one of those moments.

Mia is staring at me, wide-eyed, like I just told her I murdered her mother. I didn’t, for the record. But the book she’s holding falls from her limp hand, and her mouth moves like she’s trying to find something to say. The depth of the trouble I’m in is starting to hit me.

This is going to be bad.

“Are you serious?” she asks. “You aren’t serious. How? No. You can’t be.”

“I am.” Damn it, this is not how I wanted to tell her. “I’m so sorry. I’ve been planning on telling you. I wanted to tell you. It just never seemed like the right time, and when it did seem right, things kept happening.”

She looks at the floor, her head slowly shaking from side to side. I’m panicking, trying to come up with the right thing to say. Is there a right thing to say when you’ve been lying to the woman you’re in love with? If there is, I don’t know what it is.

“Oh my god,” she says, stepping away from me. “Oh my god. I’ve been… and you were… this whole time… and it was… Lexi was you?”

“Yes, Lexi was me.”

“Holy shit.” She puts her hand on her stomach, like she might vomit. “I’ve been telling you things—things about you. And you’ve been using that, haven’t you? You’ve been manipulating me this whole time.”

“No,” I say, putting up a hand. “No, Mia, I swear it wasn’t like that.”

“How can you say that?” she asks. “Oh god, it started in the bookstore. Can I buy you books? I told Lexi I wished a guy would do that, and you used it on me. You picked me up with my own line.”

“No. God, Mia, I didn’t know who you were then. I just thought you were cute and it seemed like a good idea.”

“When did you know?” she asks, finally looking me in the eyes.

I stare at her, suddenly unable to speak. All my logic, all the decisions that seemed perfectly reasonable up until this moment come crashing down around me. The proverbial house of cards.

I really fucked this up.

“Alex, when did you find out who I was?”

“After we had dinner at Lift,” I say, reluctantly. “You messaged Lexi and talked about your date. I knew it had to be me.”

She gapes at me, her mouth dropping open, her eyes widening.

Yep. I’m screwed.

“How could you keep this from me?”

“The only person who knows is my sister,” I say. “I kept it a secret from everybody else.”

“Yeah? Well, you aren’t sleeping with everybody else,” she says.

I wince. “Mia, please. I didn’t mean to lie to you.”

“Of course you meant to,” she says. “Lying doesn’t happen by accident.”

“No, but I wanted to tell you,” I say. “I swear, I was going to.”

She meets my eyes and crosses her arms. “But you didn’t. Why?”

Okay, maybe I should back up and explain why I’m standing in front of the love of my life, trying to make her understand how I’m also a woman named Lexi Logan.

Confused?

Yeah, me too.

It all started a little over a year ago. I know, that’s a big jump, and you want to get to the good stuff. The boy meets girl, they fall in love, have hot monkey sex, are pulled apart by conflict, and come back together for a brilliant happily-ever-after stuff. Believe me, I’m all too familiar with that story.

In fact, I write them for a living.

A year ago, that wasn’t me. Five days a week, I was schlepping off to my job, sitting in a dull gray cubicle, staring at a screen, writing computer code. I had a shitty uncomfortable chair, a boss who needed a throat punch, and a bunch of coworkers who were stuck in just as deep a rut as I was.

But in my spare time, I was writing a science fiction novel. I spent hours doing research, taking notes, drawing sketches. I would work late into the night, plodding away, word after word. The book kept getting longer, but I figured I would deal with that when I started revisions. Or maybe make it a trilogy. I certainly had enough material. More often than not, the sun would be staining the sky with color, and my eyes dry and gritty, before I’d finally fall into bed for a couple hours.

Only to get up and go to my shitty job.

To be fair, the sleep deprivation was probably not helping my attitude toward work.

I’d wanted to be a novelist ever since I was a kid. I almost majored in English, but my dad, ever a practical man, talked me into getting a computer science degree in case the writing thing didn’t work out. The problem is, that practical degree led to a practical career, which led to the soul-sucking existence I was wallowing in.

I didn’t see a way out. My job sucked. I was divorced, after a very brief and tumultuous marriage. My relationship status was basically I love women but I’m not interested in commitment. All I had was my writing.

But as much as I enjoyed the process, I knew deep down that it was more of a hobby than a career, at least the way I was doing it. Even if the finished product—if I ever finished it—turned out to be the best sci-fi epic ever written, it would take a stroke of luck to get it published and make enough money to quit my job. And considering I’d been working on it for years already, with no end in sight, it didn’t seem like I was going to write my way to a better life.

Until my sister, Kendra, said something that altered the course of my life forever.