Blind Items
A young American diplomat in Vienna keeps finding himself in a gossip column's blind items. The columnist is writing love letters in the only language he knows. Everyone can see what's happening except the two of them.
Lock with No Key
A woman moves into her boyfriend's Mattapan apartment and discovers it was fortified by his ex — three deadbolts, nailed windows, a bathroom siege lock. The question isn't whether he's dangerous. It's whether he can love you and not see you at the same time.
Prismatic
Sable, who can't always feel where her own body is in space, falls for Ren, for whom touch arrives too loud. Their erotic project: mapping each other's shifting geography, learning that desire is a practice you get better at, never a place you arrive.
Referred Sensation
Noor, a cartographic data analyst with fibromyalgia, starts a list of things her body can still want. Her downstairs neighbor Leonie, who flinches from unexpected touch, becomes the first item she can't cross off.
Sympathetic Grounds
Two practitioners of incompatible magic compete for the keepership of a dying valley. Her wild art grows and blazes; his tuned wards endure. Each wonder they build reveals more than it conceals.
Selvage and Seam
In 1854 Oberlin, Ohio, milliner Nella Goss clashes with the new minister whose Boston propriety masks depths she refuses to see. In 1873, their daughter reads the letters that rewrote everything.
Ever Since I Can Remember
A D.C. bookstore owner suspects her charming new regular is scouting her building for developers. He's actually three hundred and forty-seven years old, and he's in love with her.
Every Wrong Room
Lila Kaplan has spent twelve years setting up her friends while her best friend Tom waits for her to notice what everyone else already sees. A wedding toast, a cruel misstep, and a door opened before she knocks.
What the Anvil Holds
In Psalm, Kansas, 1893, schoolteacher Louisa Greer arrives to build a school and finds a blacksmith whose forge burns wrong. The town keeps him at the right distance. She doesn't.
Debt of Frost
A trader's daughter bargains away her warmth to save her father from a frost lord's court. The terms are exact. What they cost is not.
Unsolicited
A self-appointed relationship fixer must save an engagement she sabotaged — while sharing every planning session with a conflict mediator who thinks her methods are insane. Her cascading interventions in three couples' lives collide spectacularly.
Checkout Counter Theory
A romance novelist fleeing writer's block crashes into the rigid owner of a Cotswolds B&B, where a dare to write each other's genre becomes something neither of them planned.
Volatility Smile
A quant analyst who dismissed an urban planner as "sweet" at an engagement party seven years ago discovers her firm is advising a developer to buy the block where his grandmother lives.
Closer Architecture
A physical therapist inherits her grandmother's ability to feel others' emotions through touch. When she meets a glassblower whose emotional landscape she can't read, falling in love means letting her body be rewritten.
Involuntary Instrument
A court healer and the king's spymaster share a bond neither chose — it transmits every sensation, every lie, every want. The crown calls it an asset. They call it nothing, because naming it would make it real.
Mise en Place
A New York food critic narrates her week of setting up her best friend with the wrong men, arguing about anchovies with her co-critic, and not noticing that every detail she shares proves what she refuses to say.
Iron and Ink at Hartwell
Eight years after refusing a cotton mill owner's proposal, a gentlewoman returns to Lancashire to settle her father's debts — only to find the man she rejected has become the county's most powerful industrialist, and the argument between them never truly ended.
The Stopped Clock at Ainsworth Street
A vintage shop owner in Brooklyn finds a woman's watch stopped at 11:47 PM, April 1945 — and the woman who lost it standing in her doorway, displaced seventy-nine years, still warm. Their love story unfolds between two eras.
Wrong with Evidence
A data analyst in Bed-Stuy builds a conspiracy theory about the vanishing tenants in her building. She's wrong. The evidence is real but proves nothing she thinks it proves, and her investigation has infected the only honest thing in her life.