Her first touch was his last goodbye.
Eira Lowell preserves the past. As a Mnemonic, she can touch objects and experience their most charged emotional echoes—a kiss in a Victorian garden, a heartbreak in a jazz club. It's a beautiful, lonely gift, until she uncovers a memory that shouldn't exist: a man in modern clothing, leaving a flower on a bench in 1887, his face etched with a sorrow that feels eerily familiar.
Sam is that man. An agent of the secretive Chronos Guard, he is tasked with sanitizing time by cutting away "anomalous" emotional echoes. He operates under one brutal rule: emotion is the engine of temporal instability. For Sam, time is not linear. His life is a deck of shuffled cards, his interactions with Eira catalogued out of sequence. The moment he meets her in her archive—her first encounter—is, for him, one of his last. He is already in love with her, and he is already mourning her.
Drawn together by a dangerous temporal fracture, they become each other's greatest risk and only refuge. Eira's unique sensitivity is the key to stabilizing the fractures threatening to unravel London, but their growing, forbidden bond creates a new kind of threat—a resonance so potent it bends causality itself. Sam's superiors, led by the fanatical Lysander, identify Eira and her entire empathic bloodline as the catalyst for a coming global psychic cataclysm.
To save the future, they must perform an impossible act of love: transform their connection from a source of chaos into the very foundation of a new world. The cost will redefine them both, forever.
For fans of the tragic romance of The Time Traveler's Wife and the brilliant concepts of This Is How You Lose the Time War, The Last First Time is a breathtaking, genre-blending novel about memory, destiny, and the love that exists in the space between a first hello and a final farewell.
