The Paradox of Us is a heartbreaking, luminous YA sci-fi romance about a girl who builds a machine to save her mother from dying, only to fall in love with the boy twenty years in the past whose death was the very reason her mother lived long enough to have her.Lena, seventeen, brilliant, and hollowed out by grief, constructs a temporal communicator in a university basement lab. One night the static parts and a boy's voice slips through from October 2004. His name is Elias. He is kind, lonely, and scheduled to die in a fire in eight days.Lena saves him.Reality begins to unravel.Every moment Elias continues to breathe in 2004, Lena starts to fade from existence in 2024. Photographs erase her. Memories forget her. Her own reflection hesitates half a second behind the mirror.What began as a desperate attempt to rewrite her mother's death becomes the most impossible love story ever told: two teenagers trying to hold on to each other across twenty years while the universe itself demands payment in the form of one of their entire lives.Told in slow, luminous prose that begs to be read aloud, The Paradox of Us is a standalone novel about sacrifice, memory, and the terrifying mercy of a love willing to burn itself out so the other person gets to live.