The Girl from New York.

Dallas Winston might’ve been a full-blown juvenile delinquent in Tulsa—always in and out of trouble, always chasing some girl or another, trying to drown himself in the kind of chaos that made him feel alive—but there was one girl who cut through all that noise. One girl who had nothing to do with the streets of Tulsa or the gang wars or the cheap thrills. She was from back home.

New York. His first love. The only real thing he ever let himself hold onto before the world turned him hard.

Back in the city, before he got mixed up in that murder charge that sent him running south, he was just a wiry, angry kid with too much pride and too little to lose. And somehow, in that mess, there was her. He’d mess around, yeah—kiss her, sneak out late, hold her hand like he meant it—but it was more than just the usual messing around. It was real. She saw something in him when no one else did. Maybe even before he saw it in himself. She made him feel human, like there was something more to him than leather jackets and busted knuckles.

But that was years ago. Now, she was just a memory he kept buried under smirks and cigarettes. A soft ache that came back when he was too tired to fight it off. Something sacred. Something lost.

So when he saw her again—clear as day, behind the glass of some fine-ass restaurant in downtown Tulsa, sitting with what looked like her family, dressed nice and proper—it hit him like a sucker punch to the gut. Dally stopped in his tracks, heart thudding like it used to when he’d sneak out to see her.

His mind went haywire. Is that really her? What’s she doing here? Why Tulsa? Why now? God, when did we get so far apart?

She looked older, but still had that same smile. That same presence. And Dallas—tough, reckless Dallas—stood on the sidewalk like a kid again, seventeen and unsure, aching with something he didn’t have a name for.

He didn’t go inside. He couldn’t. She had a life now. A new one. And he? He was just a ghost from another world.

But damn if he didn’t wish, just for a second, that he could walk in and say her name out loud again. Like it still meant something.