Every Reason to Stay

by Lane Clarke

Genres: YA Contemporary Romance; Young Adult

Synopsis

A heartbreaking yet hopeful novel about one girl’s journey through grief and the family, first love, and shocking truths she finds on the other side—perfect for fans of Jandy Nelson and Every Last Word.

All her life, it’s just been sixteen-year-old Skylar and her rockstar dad against the world. But this year, a horrible accident cuts the summer short and upends her life. 
 
As Skylar grieves her dad, she discovers a huge secret: her mother is still alive. Now, Skylar is uprooted from her home and thrust into a family of strangers on the other side of the country. Furious with the mother who deserted her, she seeks comfort in her baking and decides to enter a local competition with a dazzling prize of a trip to a Parisian pastry school. As she gains her footing in the contest and her new town, she befriends a girl who seems just as lost as her, and she also finds more than friendship in the frustratingly irresistible boy next door. But as Skylar bakes her way to a brighter future, she’ll uncover truths about the past in the last place she expected. 
 
Filled with heaps of emotion, a spoonful of hope, and an unexpected twist of fate, this is a powerful story about the true meaning of home. 

Release date: July 7, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 320

Sample

The sound of the whisk hitting the side of the Le Creuset mixing bowl was a bit like music, a favorite melody that got stuck in your ear and wouldn’t shake loose until there was a new song to replace it.

I kept time with the echo of the ting as metal hit ceramic, and I watched almost in a trance as the dry ingredients were sucked down into the bottom of the bowl, creating something akin to quicksand. I stuck a finger into the bowl—sticky but not too wet. Perfect.

“Mmm, smells great, Sky,” Dad said as he sauntered into the kitchen, his guitar case slung over his shoulder like an old leather jacket. In my entire sixteen years of life, I had only seen him without the thing a handful of times. He’d probably be wearing it when he walked me down the aisle. Old reliable.

“It hasn’t even gone in the oven yet.” I laughed as I set the bowl on our makeshift island, a few pieces of plywood Dad had nailed together to give me some extra workspace in our fingertip-to-fingertip-sized kitchen.

“I smell its potential.” He gave two exaggerated sniffs, flaring his nostrils out as far as they could go. He licked his finger and stuck it in the air like he was checking the direction of the wind. “Forecast says it’s going to be delicious.”

“It’s always delicious,” I responded somewhat smugly. I’d only ever been good at two things—running and baking. But I was never a natural runner; it was something I had to work at. Hours after school spent beating the pavement until the burning in my chest and knees became almost enjoyable, as full of crap as that sounded. No one was more disappointed than me when my annual physical four years ago led to a suggestion of more physical activity. Because quite honestly, “exercise gives you endorphins” sounded like a scam and a little unhinged. So I joined track, was told I had potential, and worked my way to the top because I was stubborn.

But being in the kitchen was like rolling over in bed and settling into the perfect cool spot, like it’d been waiting for me this whole time. Legend had it that in all the random things Dad and his bandmates would hand me to get me to be quiet during rehearsals, there was nothing that brought me perfect peace like the wooden spoon—a staple in any serious baker’s arsenal.

“You know, you’re supposed to let other people tell you your food is delicious,” he said, attempting to dip his finger into the batter, no matter how many times I’d warned him of the dangers of raw ingredients in cake batter.

“You also always said you shouldn’t wait for people to tell you what you already know.”

Dad laughed, a deep guttural sound akin to a passenger train coming to a sudden stop. “Who taught you how to be so grown-up?” He picked up one of my dish towels and draped it over my head before pulling me toward him and placing a wet kiss on my forehead. “Don’t forget you’re still my little girl.”

“Gross,” I groaned, dragging the inside of my wrist over the wet spot.

He glanced down at his watch, an old Timex with a cloudy face, and blew a breath out of the corners of his mouth. “Gotta skedaddle.”

“Gonna be a late night?” I asked. Dad spent most Monday nights with his band, Gastric, at a venue on Congress Ave., a locale he had spent his entire career working toward. It had all finally paid off when he got called up to the big show last fall.

“Hopefully not,” he said as he pulled me in for another hug and straightened his guitar to fit through the narrow hallway to our front door. “But whatever the boss wants.”

“You’re the boss,” I laughed as I followed him out to his truck, an old Jeep Grand Cherokee in his favorite color, forest green. He’d had the Jeep my entire life, and in a few months when I passed the test to get my permit converted to a real driver’s license, it would be mine. Or at least that was what he’d promised on my tenth birthday, and I planned to hold him to it.

“Then I guess I’ll be home just in time for some cake.” He gave me a wink before laying his guitar gently in the trunk and climbing into the driver’s seat. No matter how old that guitar got, or how often it was accidentally knocked into a wall or doorframe, Dad still treated it like a newborn baby, his hand always cradling its neck.

He honked his horn as he turned out of our small cul-de-sac, each matchbox house smaller and more unusual than the one beside it.

I sucked in the cool air blasting down the hallway as I made my way back to the kitchen. Setting the small white timer on the counter, I poured the batter into two cake pans and slid them into the oven. Despite it being early May, it was already hot in Austin, and I hoped that the heat wouldn’t upset the batter. There was nothing worse than dense sponge cake.

The front door slammed just as I finished chopping the green heads off my strawberries. The scent of vanilla and dragon fruit chased the sound.

“Did you know your dad has almost a hundred thousand Instagram followers?” my best friend, Olivia, said as she invited herself into the house and made herself comfortable at our kitchen / dining room table.

“Don’t tell him that,” I warned her with a grin. “He’ll spend the next month DMing everyone individually to ‘thank them for their support.’ ”

“He would not,” she said before pausing. “Actually… he probably would.”

“Day ones, blah blah,” I said.

“Show your appreciation, yadda, yadda,” she finished. She placed her phone on the tabletop and stretched her arms above her head, exposing just one of her many DIYed belly chains. The rest were on her Etsy shop, going out the door faster than she could make them sometimes. “Speaking of day ones, you going to the track party next weekend?”

“You mean the one being hosted by my ex-girlfriend?” I lifted my eyebrows. Olivia was always trying to get Simone and me to talk, as if we hadn’t spent the past two years talking and talking and talking until we realized neither of us usually liked what the other had to say.

“As in, the captain.”

“Incoming, she isn’t the boss of us yet.”

“Even more important to show face. You know she doesn’t think you’re going to show up, which is exactly why you should. Plus, do you really want to go into next season with so much negative energy?”

“There’s no negative energy,” I said, pushing the bowl of sliced strawberries toward her. She gave me a knowing smile before digging in, immediately getting strawberry seeds under her gel manicure. “We broke up. It was amicable.”

“You sound like a divorcée,” she laughed, using her thumbnail to pluck a seed from beneath her pinky nail.

“As long as I got you in the split, she can keep the house.”

“Ah,” she said, placing her hand on her chest, “I love being fought over.”

I grabbed one of the strawberry stems and chucked it across the kitchen. But not only was Olivia a track rock star, she was also one of the best lacrosse players in the state, so she caught it in midair and popped it into her mouth, grimacing slightly at the taste.

“Doesn’t matter anyway. Dad has a show that night.”

“Not until, like, eleven p.m. The party will be over. In fact, I think Simone mentioned stopping by the show. You know she’s head of the Gastric Fan Club.”

“Don’t remind me,” I responded with a roll of my eyes. “Having your ex be the lead groupie of your dad’s band is so weird.”

“It’s, like, incestuous. There needs to be an equitable division of the assets.”

“Okay, Elle Woods. But seriously, you know I never miss a Saturday night show. It’s in my Beloved Only Daughter contract.”

“Ugh, why can’t you hate your parents like the rest of us?”

“Parent.” I shrugged.

Olivia grimaced. “Sorry.”

“No big deal. You know I don’t even remember her. And you’d basically need to put a gun to Dad’s head to get him to talk about her. Hurts too bad, I guess.”

“That high school sweetheart shit will mess you up. Still, I am sorry. I know you want to know more about her. But she did marry your dad and have you, so the facts support her being pretty baller.”

“Can’t argue with cold hard facts like that.”

“You’re going to cry as soon as I leave, aren’t you?” She gave me a knowing look, her eyes clouding over with sympathy. I wasn’t super emotional about my mom dying when I was just a baby, in the sense that I didn’t have any memories to attach to her. But sometimes the idea of not having a mother for all the big things still to come put a little salt in the scabbed-over wound of only having one parent.

But at least that one parent was like twenty cool parents in a trench coat.

“Maybe a tear or two, drown it out in the shower.”

Olivia snorted. “As you avoid putting your face in the water like an infant?”

“Wow. In my own home, no less.”

Olivia laughed before slamming her hands on the table to push herself up. “Pray for me,” she said as she snuck another strawberry. “Mi madre was very excited about a zucchini brownie recipe when I left this morning.”

“Those can be pretty good, actually,” I tried to assure her.

“Maybe if you were making it, Rachael Ray.” She bumped me with her hip before leaving. “See ya, loser.”

As the house quieted again, I made my way up to my dad’s room, tripping over his dirty jeans and knocked-over boots on the way to his closet. Guitar picks were scattered across the hardwood, crammed into every empty crevice. The space of a musician who ate, slept, and breathed his work.

I shimmied out a box stuffed into a corner of the overhead shelf, old ticket stubs from shows Dad used for “research” falling to the floor. It was a fabric box, worn around the edges with frayed string in every direction. Inside were pages of old song lyrics on crumpled paper, soft along the seams where they’d been folded and unfolded countless times. Blue ink was settled in deep veins spreading into the cotton of the loose-leaf. I dug to the bottom of the box until my thumb brushed the edge of a Polaroid. In the photo, faded into sepia with time, I was bundled up in a herringbone blanket, my arms tucked into my sides. A scruff of hair sat on top of my head. My face was still bloated from being just a couple of days earthside. My mother hovered over me, the back of her head toward the lens. She had braids, the black of the Kanekalon contrasting brightly with the red of her nearly auburn natural hair in the flash of the camera.

I imagined her face a million times, the smile she probably had as she looked down at me. The glint in her eye as she sang me a lullaby. Or read me a book. Or narrated her day. I imagined holding her fingers in my small hands. This was the only photo I had of us, and I couldn’t even see her face. Fitting, really, for the woman I didn’t and could never really know. For the love that sat so deeply in my father’s heart that he could not dig out even small pieces of her to share with me. But I loved my dad, and I tried not to feel resentful of his grief. He told me about her in his music, in the lyrics he wrote about love and patience and loss.

Dragging my finger over the photo, I imagined the feel of her hair beneath my fingertips. Was it coily like the hair braided in, or straighter? Was it a mix of textures like mine, smooth in the very middle and frizzy all around? Did she have a signature scent like Olivia, or a song that reminded her of home?

Sighing deeply, I slid the photo back beneath the songs and memories Dad kept hidden away. I expertly put the box back in place, fitting it into a gap in the shelf that looked too small for it. For now, I had to be happy with life as it was, sans a mother but with a dad who somehow managed to be more than enough.

Erin, our usual Tuesday night waitress, sat me and Dad in our usual booth—a solitary bench in the corner of IHOP, past the kitchen and as far away from the bathrooms as one could get. Despite the fact that I could make melt-in-your-mouth pancakes with my eyes closed and both hands tied behind my back, there was just something unbeatable about an IHOP short stack. Maybe it was the fact that it was consistent? I found comfort in knowing exactly what I was getting, no surprises. Or maybe it was the fact that Dad and I had been coming to IHOP every Tuesday for as long as I could remember that made the fare especially good.

Either way, I relished the predictability of it all as I perused the menu, already knowing what I’d come for. Short stack, a cup of whipped cream, strawberry syrup (vastly underrated), a side of sausage links, and a large orange juice that never seemed like enough no matter how slowly I sipped at it. Dad read the menu more seriously than I ever did, hopping around the listings every week and taking a chance on the specials. He wasn’t nearly as into predictability as I was. It was only when I noticed the too-offbeat tempo being stomped out with the steel toe of his work boot that I realized his eyes had not left the descriptions of the onion rings.

“Dad?” I asked, kicking him in the boot, which only served to startle me more than him. For a guy who lived in Converses, it was always weird when he wore his contractor job garb—the “real” job he was forced to work to support us. He managed to do pretty well as a musician, but “pretty well as a musician” still didn’t quite cover our mortgage, much less my frequent trips to Williams Sonoma. He had picked up the job in order to get me a much-coveted KitchenAid stand mixer for my thirteenth birthday, and had managed to hold on to it ever since. I suspected he liked being creative, even if it was with kitchen cabinetry instead of music.

“Dad?” I kicked again, this time being careful to aim for the soft, exposed part of his shin.

“Hmm?” he said, as if noticing me for the first time.

“You good?”

He grunted again and returned to studying the menu.

If there was one thing my father wasn’t, it was a man of few words. He could talk an automated machine into complete silence. “Dad?” I said, louder this time, as Erin dropped our drinks off at the table. She took out her notepad to write down his order, mine already scribbled across the top. Ah, IHOP. You just couldn’t get that kind of service everywhere.

“I think Mother’s Day is coming up soon,” he said finally, taking a big gulp of his fountain Coke, no ice.

“Uh, okay,” I responded, confusion laced in my tone. In sixteen years, we had never even acknowledged Mother’s Day. On account of, well, no mother being present. Dad didn’t speak to his parents, a falling-out occurring prior to my birth that he had never bothered to explain. Which was kind of his MO, pretending things in the past weren’t worth a mention. “Does that mean something to you?”

“We should do something,” he said. “Take a trip, see the East Coast maybe. New York, Boston, DC.”

“For… Mother’s Day?” I asked tentatively. “And you hate the East Coast.” I didn’t know much about Dad’s childhood other than the fact that he’d grown up in Virginia and hated it. Stuffy people. Stuffy summers.

“I hear it’s a lot cooler now.”

“Cooler than here?” I wasn’t a stan for my city or anything, but it was an objective fact that Austin was pretty legit. “Should we also go see a Civil War reenactment? I hear they’re all the rage.”

“Don’t be a smartass,” he said with a small laugh.

“Well, you’re being super weird, Daddio.” I took a more aggressive sip of orange juice, starting to relax into the worn pleather beneath me.

“Just some things I’ve been thinking about. Feeling like maybe I ran away from talking to you about your mom and feeling some type of way about it, is all. Maybe a trip back home would shake some things loose.”

I shrugged, even though I had been waiting for him to say that for years. There wasn’t a real way to tell him to get over losing her and talk to me about her without sounding like an ass. “If that’s how you’re feeling. Took long enough, I guess.”

“You mad at me for it?” he asked, grabbing an onion ring off his plate before it was even fully on the table. He gave Erin a smile. She was a college student at Baylor already home for the summer, and Dad had always been fond of her—she’d been our waitress for years now. “Nice kid,” he said as I mouthed the words alongside him with a laugh.

“Not mad, per se,” I said, jumping back into this admittedly weird conversation. “I definitely wish I knew more about her, but I get it.” Even though I definitely didn’t. If you loved someone and had nice things to say about them, wouldn’t you want to share them with anyone who would listen?

He gave a deep sigh and cleared his throat, bringing his fist to his mouth. “There’s just a lot that’s hard to explain.”

“Like what?” I asked. She was here one day and gone the next, an apparent labor complication that went unnoticed for days before causing absolute chaos, and pretty much the reason I never wanted to have children. Not ones I birthed, at least, though I could totally see myself fostering kids in need of a good home. Though saying that made me feel like I was talking about puppies and not actual human beings.

“All of it, really.”

Maybe it was hard to talk about pregnancy and labor with a teenager. Especially as a man, who only really went through it on the periphery. Maybe he didn’t want me to be afraid of it when I was older, even though I already was.

“We made a lot of decisions, your mom and me. Decisions that just feel less and less like the right ones.”

“Like having-a-kid sort of decisions.” A knot settled into the pit of my stomach. He finally started talking about her and it was to tell me I was a mistake?

“No, definitely not,” he said with an adamant shake of his head. “You were the best thing we ever did. I just wish we’d thought more about you growing up without her, when we… well, like I said, it’s hard to explain.”

I swirled my fork in the whipped cream before draping it over my strawberry-syrup-laden pancakes, but my appetite had left the premises.

“Was she happy? When I was born?” I asked. This had always been my biggest fear—that somewhere on the other side, wherever people went when they died, she wished she was here instead of me. I mean, that was the truth, wasn’t it? If it wasn’t for me, she’d still be alive.

“Absolutely,” he said. “No regrets from either of us ever.”

“How do you know? It’s not like you can ask her.”

“Because I know your mother,” he said.

“Knew her.”

“Hmm?”

“You knew her.”

He stared at me for a moment before a sadness settled behind his eyes.

“Yeah. I knew her.”

I draped an old T-shirt over my head to dry my hair, a trick I learned from TikTok. Shaking my head like Lassie in from the rain, I wrapped a towel around my body before sliding into my postshower shoes and yanked the bathroom door open. Steam spilled out into the hallway like dry ice.

“We never should have done it this way.” Dad’s voice floated from his room. He was louder than usual, and his typical jovial tone, something akin to Santa Claus if he wasn’t so burly, was gone. I inched toward his cracked door, pressing my ear as close as possible to the gap between door and frame.

“It was asinine then and it’s asinine now. It was selfish on my part, and it was selfish on your part.”

I held my breath to hear better. Maybe if I was really silent, I could hear who he was talking to. Dad rarely spoke to anyone in a way that didn’t display his i. . .