I hope you get this message

This is a first-love story wearing a conspiracy thriller's jacket, and it earns both. The sci-fi gives two grieving teenagers permission to say out loud what grief usually keeps locked: that abandonment and loss can feel like the same wound. Rishi writes long-distance intimacy beautifully—two kids falling for each other through static, fog, and desert sky. Read it if you liked the ache of 'I'll Give You the Sun' but want actual aliens in your heartbreak.

1. 1

   Act 1

   Static Between Two Worlds

   San Francisco, back room of a vintage record store. Seventeen-year-old Jesse Hewitt is messing with an old ham radio when a staticky voice cuts through—a girl his age, saying 'I hope you get this message' before the transmission dies. He can't let it go. He researches frequencies, gets the signal back, and learns her name: Cate. She's in Roswell, New Mexico, and somehow they're talking across hundreds of miles through a bizarre atmospheric skip. Cate's life is heavier than his. Her mother is dying of cancer; her father, a former SETI scientist, disappeared years ago claiming he would find proof of extraterrestrial life. She built her ham radio trying to reach him. Instead she reached Jesse. She tells him her father vanished while chasing a signal he believed came from an alien civilization, and that she's terrified her mother's worsening cancer and her father's obsession are connected to something larger and more ominous. Jesse understands absence—his own father died in a car accident years ago—and the kinship is instant. He confides in his best friend Leo, who waves it off as a prank or Jesse's imagination. Then Cate finds her father's hidden notebook: cryptic coordinates, signal patterns, and the phrase 'They are listening,' repeated. They start decoding it together, two kids on opposite edges of a continent, pulling on the same thread.

2. 2

   Act 2

   Nights on the Roof

   The nightly conversations stop being about signals. Cate describes the desert sky from her rooftop in Roswell; Jesse tells her about fog rolling over the Golden Gate Bridge. Somewhere in that exchange, without either of them planning it, they fall into something intimate. Then reality crashes in: Cate's mother takes a sudden decline and is hospitalized. Cate sits in the waiting room with a portable radio, and Jesse stays on the line with her for hours. That's the kind of person he is to her now—the voice that doesn't leave. Digging into her father's past, Jesse uncovers a 1990s news article about a government raid on a SETI facility in New Mexico, linked to Cate's father. The article names a classified signal, 'The Echo,' never explained to the public. Cate's mother, in a moment of lucidity, gives her daughter the closest thing to a map: 'Your father wasn't crazy. He was scared. There's a reason he left, and it wasn't us.' She dies that night. The grief doesn't paralyze Cate—it aims her. After the funeral, she decides to drive to the Very Large Array, the New Mexico radio telescope facility where her father once worked. Jesse, a thousand miles away, refuses to let her do it alone and insists on meeting her there.

3. 3

   Act 3

   The Bunker

   Jesse lies to his mother about a college visit and boards a Greyhound from San Francisco to New Mexico. Mid-trip, the radio contact with Cate drops out, and he panics, imagining the worst. He shouldn't have—Cate is already inside. At the Very Large Array, she sneaks into a restricted area using her father's old security badge and finds a locked room with outdated equipment and a computer terminal still logged into a SETI database. On it: a file labeled 'ECHO-1,' a raw audio signal that sounds like a distorted, rhythmic pulse. She records it on her phone just as a security guard discovers her and escorts her off the premises. She plays it for Jesse at a diner in Roswell—the first time they've ever seen each other in person—and he hears what the government apparently couldn't: a pattern resembling linguistic structure, not random noise. Following her father's trail, they search his last known address, a dilapidated trailer on Roswell's outskirts, and find a wall of maps, string, and photographs centered on a desert location marked with a red X. His journal claims the ECHO signal was a warning from an advanced civilization about a cosmic event that could wipe out humanity. The final entry: 'If you're reading this, I'm already gone. Don't let them silence the message.' They drive to the red X—a remote canyon—and find an abandoned underground bunker, radio equipment, a large antenna array. Her father built it. A recording of his voice waits inside: the government suppressed the ECHO signal to prevent mass panic. 'The message isn't a threat. It's an invitation. But we have to be ready to answer.' So they power up the array and broadcast ECHO-1 back into space. The equipment overloads. A blinding light fills the bunker, and they go down.

4. 4

   Act 4

   What Rises From the Water

   Hours later they wake to fried systems and one surviving speaker playing a new, clear message on a loop: a series of mathematical constants, then coordinates pointing into the Pacific Ocean. Jesse and Cate do the math—the spot sits off the coast of San Francisco. They drive back to California together, Cate carrying her grief, Jesse turning over what the message could mean. In the city they bring in Leo, who borrows them a boat, and they motor out to the coordinates. The ocean opens. A massive, silent craft rises from the water, its surface shimmering with light, and Cate whispers, 'They came.' A hatch opens—and the figure who emerges isn't an alien. It's her father, aged and weary. He explains that the aliens are peaceful observers who have been waiting for humanity to reach a level of technological maturity to join a galactic community. Then he gives her the answer to the question that broke her family: 'I had to leave to protect you and your mother. If they knew I'd made contact, they would have used you to get to me.' Cate is torn between anger and relief, and she embraces him as the craft descends back into the ocean, leaving the future uncertain.

• JJesse HewittA seventeen-year-old record store kid in San Francisco whose father died in a car accident years ago. He chases a voice on a dead ham radio and ends up crossing a thousand miles by Greyhound for a girl he's never met.
• CCate CollinsA Roswell teenager whose mother is dying of cancer and whose SETI-scientist father vanished chasing a signal. She builds a radio to find him, finds Jesse instead, and inherits his unfinished work.
• CCate's fatherA former SETI scientist who disappeared claiming he would find proof of extraterrestrial life. He left notebooks, a bunker, and a lie that turns out to be protection.
• CCate's motherDying of cancer, she spends her last lucid moment clearing her husband's name. Her death is what turns Cate's search into a mission.
• LLeoJesse's skeptical best friend who dismisses the radio story as a prank—then helps them borrow a boat when it matters.

The ham radio

The Echo

The red X on the map

The fog over the Golden Gate

The ending is a reunion disguised as an invasion. The craft rising from the Pacific looks, for one breath, like every alien-arrival story—but the figure in the hatch is a father, and the 'first contact' is really a family's delayed reckoning. Read one way, it's vindication: the man everyone called crazy was right, and his absence was the price of the truth. Read another, it's a quieter indictment—he still chose the mission over his daughters, and the embrace Cate gives him is tangled with anger the book wisely doesn't erase. The craft descending back into the ocean, future uncertain, refuses both clean forgiveness and clean tragedy. What lands is the symmetry: Cate spent the whole book transmitting into the dark, and the answer, when it finally came, was the voice she was originally trying to reach.

1. 1.Is Cate's father's choice—leaving to protect his family—defensible, or does 'protection' just become the story adults tell about abandonment? Use her mother's dying words and his bunker recording.
2. 2.The government suppresses the Echo to prevent mass panic, and Leo dismisses Jesse's radio contact as imagination. What does the book suggest about who gets believed, and what it costs to be a skeptic?
3. 3.The romance develops entirely through descriptions of separate landscapes—desert sky, bridge fog. What is the book saying about intimacy, distance, and whether love requires being in the same place?

Teens and adults who like their romance with a side of conspiracy—readers of A.S. King and 'Stranger Things' energy. Especially for anyone who's ever lost someone and wanted, badly, to get one more message through.

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