My foreign cities

the long version

When she was just seventeen, independent and ambitious Elizabeth Scarboro fell in love with irreverent and irresistible Stephen. She knew he had cystic fibrosis, that he was expected to live only until the age of thirty or so, and that soon she'd have a choice to make. She could set out to travel, date, and lead the adventurous life she'd imagined, or she could be with Stephen, who came with an urgency of his own. In choosing him, Scarboro embraced another kind of adventure--simultaneously joyous and heartrending--staying with Stephen and building a life in the ten years they'd have together. The illness would be present in the background of their lives and then ever-more-insistently in the foreground. Scarboro tells her story of fierce love and its limitations. My Foreign Cities is a portrait of a young couple approaching mortality with reckless abandon, gleefully outrunning it for as long as they can.