6:17pm. Track Six. Ten years from today. No Matter What.
That was the promise. The pact two people made at South Station when duty pulled them apart and love wasn't enough to make either of them stay. Isabella Middleton has spent ten years becoming someone who didn't need Weston Parker. He never stopped counting down.
Now the date is here. But so is something else. A conspiracy closing in on Boston with a clock of its own — and an investigation that puts Weston back inside the city, back inside the danger, and closer to Isabella than either of them planned. The reunion they promised each other is hours away. The city they love may not make it there with them.
Ten years of waiting. Seven days to stop what's coming. One promise neither of them ever let go of.
From debut author Kevin Coll — Amazon readers are saying ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "I couldn't put it down! Once you start this book have plenty of time available — you won't want to stop."
Perfect for fans of Sandra Brown, Harlan Coben, and Nora Roberts — No Matter What is Book One of The Collide Series.
6:17pm. Track Six. Ten years from today. No Matter What.
That was the promise. The pact two people made at South Station when duty pulled them apart and love wasn't enough to make either of them stay. Isabella Middleton has spent ten years becoming someone who didn't need Weston Parker. He never stopped counting down.
Now the date is here. But so is something else. A conspiracy closing in on Boston with a clock of its own — and an investigation that puts Weston back inside the city, back inside the danger, and closer to Isabella than either of them planned. The reunion they promised each other is hours away. The city they love may not make it there with them.
Ten years of waiting. Seven days to stop what's coming. One promise neither of them ever let go of.
From debut author Kevin Coll — Amazon readers are saying ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "I couldn't put it down! Once you start this book have plenty of time available — you won't want to stop."
Perfect for fans of Sandra Brown, Harlan Coben, and Nora Roberts — No Matter What is Book One of The Collide Series.
South Station, Boston — Winter 2002
South Station always sounded bigger in people’s mouths than it felt in real life. In movies it was all sweeping arches and romantic trains and orchestral music—the kind of place where strangers ran through crowds to catch one last kiss before the doors shut. In truth it smelled like coffee that had been sitting too long on a warmer, wet wool coats, and that sharp metallic cold that lived in the seams of winter.
And tonight it was dressed up for Christmas like it was trying to convince everyone passing through that nothing sad could happen here. Tinsel looped around columns. Wreaths hung at odd heights, as if someone had decided that cheer mattered more than symmetry. Strings of white lights were draped along the edges of the concourse, the glow reflecting off the polished floor in smeared little constellations. Somewhere near the ticket counters, a group of carolers had set up—college kids, mostly—holding songbooks like shields against the cold and singing something bright and sure. Joy to the world, the Lord is come—
The notes rose and fell into the constant churn of footsteps and rolling luggage. People moved fast, collars up, faces forward, hands full of bags and gift boxes and purpose. A man in a Red Sox cap argued quietly into a flip phone. A kid in a puffy jacket dragged a stuffed bear by one arm. A woman wearing a wool hat with a pom-pom laughed like she had nowhere else to be.
Isabella sat on a bench that faced the tracks, hands wrapped around a paper cup of hot chocolate she didn’t want, watching her breath fog faintly in the air. The cup was too warm for her fingers. The whole station felt too warm for what she was about to do. Weston sat beside her, close enough that she could feel the heat of him through his coat, but the space between them might as well have been a locked door. He’d always looked like someone who belonged in motion— like he was built for airports and highways and whatever came next. Broad shoulders, athletic in a way that didn’t try too hard. A face that could talk its way out of trouble and sometimes into it.
Tonight his jaw was tight, his eyes fixed on the tracks as if he could stare a train into arriving early. His suitcase stood upright at his feet. There were two stickers on it: one from a summer trip to Cape Cod and one that said BOSTON in block letters. It made Isabella’s throat hurt, that word. She’d started to hate the shape of her own city, the way it contained her like a box and yet was the only place she wanted to be right now. “You didn’t have to come in with me,” he said. His voice was calm—too calm. Weston did calm the way some people did anger: tightly, deliberately, like he was keeping it behind his teeth.
Isabella kept her eyes on the carolers. They’d moved into O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, the melody softening everything around them. “I wanted to,” she said. “It felt… wrong to say goodbye in the parking lot.” He let out a breath, a half laugh that didn’t find its way all the way into his face. “Yeah. That would’ve been… classy.” She managed a small smile that lasted maybe a second. They’d been dating long enough to have habits. They’d been dating long enough to have a rhythm. Even on their worst days, there was usually an undercurrent of us.
Tonight it was like someone had cut the cord and they were each floating, unmoored, pretending they could still hear each other across a distance that was growing by the minute. Isabella’s fingers tightened around the cup. Her hands were steady—she could thread a needle, suture a wound, take an exam and walk out feeling like she’d been carved out and still keep her posture. But this? This made her feel like she was fourteen again, standing outside her mother’s bedroom door while a stranger’s voice whispered inside. She turned her head, finally, and looked at him. Weston’s eyes flicked toward her and away again, as if eye contact might make it real. “Say it,” she thought, but she didn’t. She had promised herself she wouldn’t make this worse by turning it into a fight, a plea, a scene. She had promised herself she would be brave.
Brave was easy in textbooks. Brave was easy when you knew the right answer. Brave was not easy when you were about to let go of the best thing you’d ever had because you didn’t know how to hold it and a future at the same time. A loudspeaker crackled overhead. “Amtrak service to New York Penn Station and onward stops now boarding—Track Six—” The words dissolved into static.
Isabella’s stomach clenched. Track Six. That wasn’t his train yet, but it made her jump anyway. Weston shifted, flexing his fingers like he needed to keep them busy. “You’re quiet.” “I’m thinking.” “About what?” She swallowed. The truth was, she’d been thinking about everything. She’d been thinking about his mouth on hers at two in the morning, the way he said her name like it was something he’d invented. She’d been thinking about his hand at the small of her back when they crossed streets. She’d been thinking about her acceptance letter, creased from being opened too many times, and his face when she’d shown him, joy and pride and fear all at once. And she’d been thinking about the version of herself that would stay, because of him. The version of herself that would always wonder if she had traded something sacred for something safe. “I’m thinking,” she said carefully, “that we’re doing the right thing.”
Weston’s gaze snapped to hers. “You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself.” “Maybe I am.” He stared for a long moment, and in his eyes she saw it—the same fight she felt in her own chest. The same instinct to reach, to grab, to pull the other person back and say No, actually, we can make this work if we just try harder. But trying harder couldn’t change geography. It couldn’t stretch hours. It couldn’t erase the debt of time. “You’re going to be a doctor,” he said softly, like it was a prayer. “A real one. Not just… you know, talking about it.” Isabella felt something in her chest loosen and tighten at the same time. “Trauma surgery,” she said, because naming it made it more solid.
He nodded. “Trauma surgery.” “That’s what you always call it,” she said. “Like it’s already mine.” “It is,” he said, and there was no hesitation. “You’ve wanted that since you were—what? Fifteen?” “Fourteen,” she corrected automatically. “Fourteen,” he repeated. His mouth did something like a smile and then fell away. “And London isn’t forever.” No. It wasn’t. That was the cruel part. London was temporary. His internship—his opportunity, the one he’d worked for, the one that had come out of nowhere like a door opening in a hallway he hadn’t known existed—was a few months. Six, at most. But Isabella’s medical school wasn’t temporary. Her life wasn’t temporary. Her next ten years were stacked up like bricks and each one had a name: anatomy, rotations, residency, nights on call, hands in blood, sleep in scraps, the slow, brutal earning of competence.
And Weston—Weston was a wild variable. Weston was motion. “What if it isn’t?” she asked before she could stop herself. His throat worked. He looked down at his hands. “It’s an internship,” he said. “It’s… it’s a foot in the door.” “At a door I can’t even see,” she said, and hated the edge in her voice as soon as it left. He flinched—not visibly, but internally, the way his shoulders shifted a millimeter. “It’s not like that.” Isabella stared at him. “Then what is it like?” The carolers behind them lifted into a bright harmony, and the station felt suddenly too loud and too bright.
Weston opened his mouth. Closed it. For the first time tonight, he looked young. Not boyish—Weston would never be boyish—but young in the way someone looks when the future has gotten too big to hold. “It’s a chance,” he said finally. “A real one.” “A chance at what?” she pressed. He met her eyes. And for a heartbeat she thought he was going to tell her the whole truth—whatever it was, whatever lived behind that careful calm he wore tonight like armor. But then his gaze flicked past her shoulder, to the moving crowd. To the security guard walking the concourse. To the overhead cameras. To the signs. Like he was checking the world before speaking. Isabella’s chest tightened. “A chance to make something… matter,” he said, quieter now. “To do something that isn’t just—”
He cut himself off, jaw clenching. “Just what?” she asked. He shook his head once, a small, sharp movement. “Forget it.” “No.” The word came out harsher than she intended, and people turned slightly, then turned away because no one wanted to witness a breakup on a bench at South Station. Isabella lowered her voice. “Don’t do that. Don’t shut me out. Not tonight.” Weston stared at her, and she saw anger flash—anger at the situation, at the station, at time, at the whole unfair architecture of their lives. Then it dissolved into something worse.
Fear. “I’m not shutting you out,” he said, but he sounded like he was lying even to himself. “I just… I can’t explain it in a way that makes you feel better.” “Try,” she whispered. He looked at her like he wanted to reach for her hand and didn’t trust himself. “It’s bigger than me,” he said. “That’s all I can say. It’s bigger than what I thought my life was going to be. And it’s—” He swallowed. “It’s the kind of thing that, if I do it right, you never hear about.” Isabella’s fingers went cold around the hot cup. “What?” she breathed. Weston gave a small shake of his head. “I’m not—listen. I’m not going to be gone forever. I’m not disappearing. I’m not—” He stopped, as if the word dying had nearly slipped out and he had caught it between his teeth. Isabella heard it anyway. There were so many versions of the future in that moment, fanning out like thin glass. London, yes. Distance. Waiting. But also… danger. Secrets. The possibility that he wasn’t just leaving for some glossy internship where he’d wear a suit and learn how to shake hands with the right people.
He looked like someone about to step into a tunnel. And Isabella—Isabella was about to step into her own tunnel. She set the cup down on the bench between them and folded her hands in her lap. She forced herself to breathe slowly, the way she would one day breathe slowly while looking at a wound she’d never seen before. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” Weston blinked. “Okay?” “I don’t need you to sell it to me,” she said, voice steadier now. “I don’t need you to convince me you’re making the right decision. I know you. When you get that look, you’ve already decided.”
His lips pressed together. He didn’t deny it. “And I’ve already decided too,” she continued, and the words felt like stones dropping into deep water. Weston’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Decided what?” Isabella stared at the tracks. “I’m staying,” she said. “I’m going to med school. I’m going to do trauma surgery. I’m going to—” Her throat caught. “I’m going to become someone I’m proud of.” Weston’s face softened, and that softness almost undid her. “I know,” he said. “I know you are.” “And you’re going,” she said, because saying it out loud was the only way to keep from pretending it could be different. “You’re going to London, and whatever else that means.” He let out a breath like he’d been holding it for hours. Isabella turned her head and looked at him again. “So we have two options.” Weston’s eyes searched her face. “Yeah?” “We can do the long-distance thing,” she said, and her voice nearly broke on the words. “We can spend the next ten years—however long—trying to keep something alive through phone calls and missed holidays and half-truths and—”
Weston’s jaw tightened again. “Don’t.” “Or,” she said, ignoring him, because she had to finish, “we can admit that we’re not built for that. That it will turn us into people we don’t like. It will turn this”—she gestured loosely between them, as if pointing at an invisible thread—“into resentment.” Weston’s eyes went shiny. He looked away fast. Isabella blinked hard. She refused to cry here. Not in public. Not with the carolers singing and strangers walking by with presents and joy. She refused to make her heartbreak a spectacle.
“I don’t want to hate you,” she whispered. Weston’s voice was rough. “You couldn’t.” “I could,” she said softly. “If we do it wrong, I could.” He stared at the floor for a long moment. When he looked back at her, his face had changed. Some part of him had let go. “You’re right,” he said. The words should have felt like relief. Instead they felt like a door closing. Isabella nodded once, as if sealing it. “So… this is us being honest.” Weston swallowed. “Yeah.” They sat like that for a beat, the station moving around them like water around stones. Then Weston reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a small folded piece of paper. He held it out. Isabella frowned. “What is that?”
“Open it,” he said. She took it carefully, like it might cut her, and unfolded it. It was a receipt. Not the kind with coffee stains and numbers. A printed itinerary. Dates. Times. A line that read South Station — Boston. Isabella’s breath hitched.
“What is—”
“It’s not a ticket,” Weston said quickly. “It’s… it’s just something I printed. So I don’t forget.” She scanned it.
December 22, 2012. 6:17 PM. South Station. Bench by Track Six. Her heart stuttered.
“Weston—”
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped like he was praying. “Ten years,” he said. “Same place. Same time. No matter what.”
Isabella stared at the paper, the bold black ink like a dare. “That’s insane,” she whispered.
“Maybe,” he said. “But I need it to be exact.” “Why?” she asked, and then immediately regretted the question because she knew the answer. Because if you made it exact, it became real. Because if it was real, it could hold you up when everything else shook. Weston’s voice was low. “Because if I don’t give myself a date, I’ll keep telling myself ‘later.’” Isabella’s throat tightened. “And because,” he added, almost inaudibly, “I can’t leave you with nothing.” She looked at him then, really looked. His eyes were wet. Weston Parker did not cry. Weston Parker swallowed his pain and made jokes and ran faster. But right now he looked like a man standing on the edge of something dark, reaching for a rope he wasn’t sure would hold. Isabella’s hands shook around the paper. “What if I’m married?” she blurted, because panic made her cruel. “What if you’re married? What if I have kids? What if you have kids? What if we—”
“No matter what,” Weston said, firm now. “That’s the point. We show up. We look each other in the eye. We—” He exhaled. “We let the truth exist.” Isabella’s breath came shallow. “And if the truth is we’re not meant to be?” she asked, voice
trembling. Weston stared at her for a long moment, then nodded once. “Then at least we’ll know,” he said. “And we won’t spend our lives wondering if we missed it.”
Isabella’s eyes burned. She looked down at the itinerary again. December 22, 2012. Ten years. Her medical school would be done. Residency would be underway or complete. She would be in her own skin by then. She would be someone.
She’d never been a person who believed in fate. She believed in choices. In grit. In work. But there was something about this—something about pinning a promise to a calendar like a flag—that made her feel like the future had teeth. “What time did you pick?” she asked, trying to steady herself with practicality. Weston’s mouth twitched, the ghost of the old him. “6:17.”
“That’s… oddly specific.” “Yeah.” He shrugged. “The clock in the station over there”—he nodded toward the big hanging clock—“it was 6:17 the first
time you kissed me here. Remember?”
Isabella’s chest tightened so hard she thought it might split.She did remember. She remembered racing in from the cold, laughing because she’d nearly missed her train back to campus. She remembered Weston leaning in, warm and bold and certain, and kissing her like he’d already decided he belonged in her life. She hadn’t even realized she’d been in love then. Not fully. It had taken time for love to settle into her bones. Time. Always time. She pressed her lips together, trying to stop them from shaking. “If I do this,” she said quietly, “if I agree to this—”
“You already did,” Weston said. “Ten years. You said it. I just… wrote it down.”
Isabella let out a shaky laugh that turned into something almost like a sob. She cleared her throat. “If I do this,” she repeated, “I’m not promising you that I’ll be
the same.” “Good,” Weston said immediately. “Don’t be.”
She blinked. He leaned closer, voice low and urgent. “Be someone who
saves lives,” he said. “Be someone who walks into rooms other people run from. Be someone who—” His throat caught. “Be someone I can be proud of from across an ocean.” Isabella’s eyes overflowed despite her best efforts. A tear slid down her cheek, hot and humiliating. Weston’s hand lifted, hovered near her face, and then stopped—as if he didn’t know if he was allowed to touch her anymore. Isabella closed the distance herself. She leaned into his palm, the contact simple and devastating. Weston’s hand cupped her cheek gently, thumb brushing the tear away like it was something he could erase. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I know,” she whispered back. The carolers behind them hit a swelling note, something triumphant and bright, and Isabella wanted to scream at the absurdity of it. The world did not pause for heartbreak. The world kept singing.
She pulled back slightly, enough to see him. “Okay,” she said, voice raw. “Ten years.” Weston’s eyes sharpened, like he didn’t dare believe it until he heard it again. “Ten years,” she repeated, firmer now. “December 22, 2012. 6:17 PM. Bench by Track Six.” He stared at her like she’d handed him oxygen. “No matter what,” she added, because she understood the rule and because she was brave enough to let it be true. Weston swallowed hard. “No matter what.” Isabella folded the paper carefully and tucked it into her own coat pocket. “You keep a copy too,” she said. “I will,” he promised. A loudspeaker crackled again. “Amtrak service to New York Penn Station—Track Six—final call—”
Weston’s shoulders went rigid. “That’s mine,” he said. Isabella’s chest tightened so fast she almost couldn’t breathe. He stood, grabbed his suitcase handle, and for a second he looked like a stranger—like a man simply catching a train. Then he looked back at her, and the mask slipped. Isabella stood too, too fast, the bench scraping faintly behind her. They faced each other in the flow of the station. People moved around them like water around rocks, some glancing, most not. A woman brushed past with a wrapped gift under her arm. A man rolled a suitcase that clicked loudly over a seam in the floor. Weston set his suitcase beside him and reached for Isabella’s hands. Her fingers slid into his like they belonged there.
They stood like that for a moment, hands clasped, the station lights glowing above them, the carolers singing something that sounded like hope.
“I don’t know what I’m walking into,” Weston said, voice barely above the noise. Isabella’s throat tightened. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s true,” he said. “Then say what you do know,” she whispered. Weston stared at her. His eyes were dark and intense and painfully familiar. “I know I love you,” he said simply. Isabella’s breath caught. “And I know,” he continued, voice rough, “that if I don’t leave now, I’ll stay.” Isabella’s eyes burned again. She nodded once, because she understood that kind of truth. “You have to go,” she whispered. Weston’s jaw clenched. “Yeah.” Isabella stepped closer, so close she could smell his cologne—
something clean and warm that would haunt her later. She lifted her hands to his face, fingers splaying along his jaw, his cheekbones, memorizing the shape like she could keep it. He leaned into her touch, eyes closing briefly. Then Isabella kissed him. Not like the first time—young and reckless and certain. This kiss was deliberate. It was a promise and a goodbye and a wound all at once.
Weston kissed her back like he was trying to put something of himself inside her, something that would survive the distance. When they broke apart, Isabella’s lips were trembling. Weston rested his forehead against hers for a heartbeat. “6:17,” he whispered. “6:17,” she echoed.
He pulled away before she could grab him and refuse. Weston took his suitcase and moved toward Track Six. Isabella stood still, hands clenched at her sides, watching him thread through the crowd. He didn’t look back immediately. He walked like someone who had trained himself not to look
back. At the entrance to the platform, he paused. His shoulders rose and fell once, like he was taking in air. Then he turned. His eyes found her across the distance, and for a second the station fell silent in her mind. No footsteps. No rolling suitcases. No carolers. Just Weston looking at her like she was the only fixed point in a world made of moving parts. He lifted his hand. Isabella lifted hers too.
Then he turned and disappeared down the stairs to the platform. Isabella stood there long after he was gone. The carolers shifted into Silent Night, the irony so sharp it almost made her laugh. She pressed her hand to her coat pocket, feeling the folded paper there.
December 22, 2012. 6:17 PM. No matter what.
Outside, snow began to fall—soft flakes drifting past the windows like the world was trying to be gentle. Inside, Isabella Middleton drew a breath that felt like swallowing glass and turned toward the exit. She walked out into the cold, alone, with a date in her pocket and ten years ahead of her like a long, dark track. And somewhere behind her, a train pulled away.
A train station. A parting. That's where this book starts with two characters who we're just meeting and getting to know who they are to each other. And it's a great opening to a novel, the atmosphere of the station conveyed through well-observed description, the couple static and composed in a sea of travellers, waiting for the moment where one of them departs. But before the separation inevitably happens, a promise is made to meet in the future in this place at a specific time and as the time draws near, in the countdown to the date is where the real action of the book begins.
Shift forward then to the few days before the meeting. We follow the separate lives of the two people: Weston and Isabella. It is Weston who is the more mysterious of the two, Isabella having followed her medical aspirations and is now a top surgeon in Boston. Weston, however, is pursuing danger somewhere else in a composed, methodical way reminiscent of a super spy and there is a question as to whether he will be able to meet the promise that he made to Isabella ten years previously. There is also the chance that he might be bringing the danger inadvertently to Isabella and so, we're in a tense situation where Weston's world and Isabella's may collide but not with a reconciliation in a railway station.
This was a good thriller which was original in the threat it presented and how it manifested itself. The descriptions of the damage the threat inflicted made me wriggle in discomfort reading them but not so much that I had to stop reading. The dialogue which Coll uses between Weston and Isabella at the start of the book had me gripped, it was so well-delivered and realised and simmered with hidden emotion. The book is well-paced, ending on a cliffhanger with the next in the series being released later this year. It left me wanting to know more, as little threads of plot were teased out from the narrative all the way through but not necessarily tied off. I can only hope that this was done with a view to tying them all together as the series progresses.
I, for one, would like to read more and will be looking out for when the next book in the series is out.