Lily

By Michael Jonathan Hyde

He carried everything alone. Until she wouldn't let him.

At sixteen, Ethan knows how to keep a secret. His mother is ill. His father is gone. Every morning he checks the oxygen concentrator, fills the prescriptions, makes dinner for two, and walks into school like none of it exists. He has been doing this for two years. He is very good at it.

Then a girl named Lily sets her tray down across from him at lunch and starts paying attention.

What begins as an unlikely friendship slowly becomes something neither of them planned for - complicated by the secret Lily is keeping of her own, a quiet friendship with Ethan's mother conducted in stolen afternoon hours while Ethan is at school, unaware that two people he loves have found each other in the space he left behind.

Lily is a tender, aching story about the weight we carry alone, the people who find us anyway, and the quiet courage it takes to let someone stay. Told through the eyes of adult Ethan looking back on the year that changed everything, it is above all a love letter to a mother who knew exactly what she was doing - right up until the end.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GVPVBVPM
• ISBN13: 9798254327547
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 5.5" x 8.5"