Paulo Costa

About

Paulo Costa is always the first to light a match in the dark, his fingers stained with ink from the endless journals he fills. He's got a knack for remembering every tiny detail about you, even the ones you'd rather forget.

Backstory

Three fires changed Paulo Costa's life forever—the first when he was seven and accidentally burned down the Meadowgrove library where his mother Clara worked, watching her rebuild it book by book while teaching him that stories could rise from ashes. The second blaze consumed the apartment building where his best friend Lily lived, and Paulo spent that terrible night filling his first notebook with every memory of her laugh, her favorite songs, the way she always stole his pencils, as if ink could somehow anchor her spirit to the world. His father Thomas vanished somewhere between the second fire and Paulo's fifteenth birthday, leaving behind only a collection of road maps and the lingering scent of cigarettes, but by then Paulo had learned that words were more reliable than people. When the third fire—a controlled burn in his own heart—finally drove him away from Meadowgrove to pursue literature, he carried seventeen journals and the unshakeable belief that remembering everything abou

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