If you are ready to be emotionally wrecked yet again, you are in luck.

Gayle Forman, the author behind If I Stay and Where She Went (amongst others), has a new book coming out this March and it looks perfectly in line with what we’ve come to expect. The following excerpt from I Have Lost My Way will have your heart aching for one of it’s protagonists, Harun, and we haven’t even met Nathaniel yet. If you would like to get introduced to Freya, check out her excerpt at Cosmopolitan.

Here’s everything you didn’t know about I Have Lost My Way:

About ‘I Have Lost My Way’

On the surface, the three indelible characters in I HAVE LOST MY WAY could not seem more different. There is Freya, a singer on the cusp of fame when she loses her voice and with it the prospect of everything she’s fought so hard for. There is Harun, who has been living a lie for years and has this one last day to be honest about who he is, who he loves, before he commits himself to a life-long deception. There is Nathaniel, who has just arrived in New York City, his first time away from his remote forest home, his first time separated from his father, with whom he long ago formed a dangerously inescapable “fellowship of two.” All three of these teens have sacrificed enormously, and suffered deeply personal losses, leaving them alone and adrift. Until they find each other in the middle of Central Park and things begin to change.

‘I Have Lost My Way’ excerpt

Around the time Freya is speaking to yet another doctor who cannot help her, Harun is trying to pray.
As the men stream into the mosque, taking their place on the rugs around Harun and his father, he tries to make his intention known to God. But for the life of him, he can’t. He doesn’t know what his intentions are anymore.

He will make for him a way out, his cousin had texted. But what is Harun’s way out?

I have lost my way, Harun thinks as the prayer begins.

“Allah Akbar,” he hears his father chant beside him.

And again, the thought: I have lost my way. Harun tries to focus. But he can’t. He can think of nothing but James.

Forgive me, Harun had texted this morning.

No response. Not even a Get the fuck out my life, which was the last thing James had said to him. There wouldn’t be a response. James never said things he didn’t mean. Unlike Harun.

When the zuhr concludes, Harun and his father go outside to collect their shoes and exchange pleasantries with the other men. All around, there is talk of Hassan Bahara, who died last week while fueling his car at the gas station.

“It was his heart,” Nasir Janjua tells Abu.

Clucking of tongues ensues. Confessions of high cholesterol levels. Wifely naggings to get more exercise.

“No, no,” Nasir Janjua says. “It was a heart defect, silent until now.”

A defect of the heart. Harun knows a thing or two about those. But unlike Hassan Bahara, his defect isn’t silent. He’s known about it for years.

Abu clasps an arm on Harun’s shoulder. “Everything okay?”

I have lost my way. He imagines telling Abu this. But that would only break his father’s heart. It was always a choice of whose to break. As for his own, a foregone conclusion. Broken either way. It’s what happens with defective hearts.

“Yeah, Abu, I’m fine,” he says.

“You sure?” he asks. “You don’t often come to mosque.” There’s no reproach in his voice. His older brother Saif started middle school on the day 9/11 happened, and after that he began calling himself Steve and refusing to attend mosque. By the time Harun stopped going, the battle had already been lost. Or won. Depending on how you looked at it.

“I figured since I’m going . . .” he trails off. “Amir goes every day.”

“Yes, your cousin is very devout.” Abu ruffles his hair. “You are a good boy. You have made Ammi very happy.”

“And you?”

“Always.”

It is for the always he’s doing this. To continue the always. To never lose the always.

They reach the intersection of Sip and Westside. Harun turns left, in the opposite direction from his house and Abu’s store.

“I thought no school today,” Abu says, assuming that is where Harun is going.

There’s never school on Thursdays. Thursdays are the invisible day added to the weekly schedule last year. Thursdays are their day to be together in Manhattan, where they can slip through the streets like ghosts.
In winter, they meet at Chelsea Market, waltzing through the restaurants they can’t afford to eat at while James, who wants to be a chef one day, ogles the fresh pasta, the buttery croissants, the sausages drying from the rafters, and describes all the meals he will cook for them one day. When the weather is warm, they meet under a little arched bridge in Central Park.

They have not missed a single Thursday. Not when a blizzard shut down the above-ground trains, not when James was sick with bronchitis and all Harun wanted to do was get him somewhere warm and dry but for the life of him could not imagine where such a place might be. They’d wound up in a Panera, drinking tea, watching YouTube videos, pretending it was their apartment.

“I’m just going to tie up some loose ends,” he tells Abu.

“Don’t be late for dinner,” Abu says. “Your mother has taken the last two days off work to cook.. Your brother is coming. With his wife.” His father tries not to frown at the mention of Saif’s wife but is not entirely successful.

“I won’t be late,” Harun says, even though before he left the house, he took his passport and the five hundred dollars cash meant for tomorrow’s trip and tucked them into his pocket. It was a rash, last-minute thing to do, but it opened up the possibility of not getting on that plane, of running away for good, in which case he would be very late for dinner.

Coward.

I have lost my way.

He hugs his father goodbye, which isn’t something he often does, and he worries that it’ll arouse suspicion but it doesn’t because Abu says only: “Be home in time. You know how your mother gets.”

As soon as Abu is safely out of sight, he texts: Going to our place @ park. Meet me there.

At Journal Square, he enters the Path station. The smell of the tunnels—musty, moldy, redolent of old garages—makes him ache for James. Everything does.

He takes the train to the terminus at Thirty-Third Street and walks out past the neon signs of the chain clothing stores. In the early days, before they’d learned the secret public spaces in the city, they’d sometimes stopped in one of these shops, trying on all manner of sweaters and trousers neither had any intention of buying because they could sneak into the same dressing room and, behind those slatted doors, the discarded sweaters at their feet like a camouflage, steal a kiss. Every so often they’d buy something, like the socks Harun is wearing today. They called it rent.

The phone rings in his hand and Harun jumps, hope rushing in like a rising tide, but it’s not James.

“I was thinking it might be nice to buy some of that hand cream for Khala,” Ammi says, even though there’s already a suitcase of gifts for Khala and for Khalu, the cousins, and of course for the prospective families he’d be meeting. “Are you passing by the Hudson?”

Hudson is a mall not far from their house. “Sure,” he tells her, because what is one more lie on the steaming pile of them?

“And some ginger. I want to make you some tea for the plane.”

“They won’t let me bring liquids through security.”

“Well, until security,” Ammi says. “To keep you in good health.”

His throat closes. He is a coward and a liar and a bad son. He hangs up, and a minute later his phone buzzes with a text and he pulls it out, once again full of hope, but it is Amir.

I will see you soon, Inshallah.

Inshallah, he texts back.

He walks into the park, guided by autopilot and hope, to their spot at the bridge. When he sees someone waiting on top, under the cherry tree that, on that last day, they kissed under, his hope surges again. It could be him, he tells himself, even though the skin is too light and the frame is too small and also it is a woman. If only James were a woman. Ha.

I’m here, he texts.

There is no answer, but that doesn’t stop him from seeing James everywhere. There he is, riding a bike in spandex, though James would be horrified by anyone even picturing him in such a ridiculous getup. There he is pushing a baby in a jogging stroller, though James hates exercise. There he is coming toward him, through the tunnel under the bridge.

None of these people are James, and for that, Harun hates them. He hates everything and everyone in this world. If Allah made the world, why did he make Harun wrong? If Allah is love, then why isn’t James the one walking through the tunnel instead of some white boy?

This is what he’s thinking at the exact moment the girl who is not James falls off the side of the bridge, landing with a loud thud on the boy who is also not James.

About Gayle Forman

Gayle Forman is an award-winning, #1 USA Today bestselling author and journalist. She is the author of If I Stay, Where She Went, Just One Day, Just One Year, I Was Here, and Leave Me. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughters.