Return of the Fireflies - Paperback

by Laura Hollowell (Author)

Unrequited love is a ruthless seeker of hearts and once in a while, it claims a victim for life. Lucy Bells understands the gravity of this condition all too well since she fell in love at 16 and now, 20 years later, is still broken from the breakup of her first and only love, Connor Hawthorn. As Lucy approaches 40, she realizes that if she continues to wait for Connor's return, she risks becoming some modern-day version of Dickens' Miss Havisham. In a last-ditch effort to claim back her life, Lucy writes her love story hoping to find a way to escape it.Her story begins in the late 1980s, just before she met Connor, a time when she, a reclusive preacher's daughter, believed Morrissey was the only one who could ever understand her. She writes about the gothic after-party house where fate brought them together, the beauty and confusion of first love, and the corner lot where he dropped her off and drove out of her life. From that moment, Lucy believed Connor would come back someday just like her faithful fireflies had done each summer in the sweltering heat of her North Carolina backyard...and she was determined to be ready when that happened. Lucy experiences a life of contradiction; wrestling with her desire to be free from him and her burdensome need to be with only him. From the safety and security of a college campus to the isolated mud huts of a West African village, she finds that despite learning, growing, and changing in numerous ways, her stubborn heart refuses to budge. She is hopelessly trapped in a love affair that died long ago, or did it? Will Connor come back to Lucy and prove that if you love something and let it go, if it was truly yours, it will eventually return?