Showing results by author "Cora Hartley" in All Categories

After the rules fall away, what’s left between two people?Emma and Daniel worked hard to build something steady. In the beginning, their relationship had structure—intentional conversations, careful check-ins, a shared language for safety.Now, things are easier.And that’s what unsettles...

Nora Alcott restores damaged books for a living.When she accepts a commission at a remote coastal estate in Maine, she expects long days in a quiet library assessing a deteriorating private collection.What she does not expect is Aldgate House itself—or Callum Aldgate, the reserved furniture...

Maren Shaw builds instruments she never hears played.For fifteen years, the luthier has devoted herself to the quiet discipline of crafting violins and cellos in her Vermont workshop, sending them out into the world and keeping a careful distance from the lives they go on to lead. It is a life...

Silas Voss hears everything. Every frequency. Every vibration. Every flaw in the world around him. So he built a room to escape it—a space of absolute silence known as True Zero. Then Clementine moves in next door. She restores antique clocks. Hundreds of them. Each one ticking, pulsing, alive. To Silas, it’s unbearable noise. To Clementine, it’s the sound of time itself. What begins as conflict becomes something neither of them expects—a connection built not through words, but through sound. Through shared frequencies. Through rhythm. Through the fragile space between silence and meaning.

Twenty-two years ago, Ava Chen and Ben Torres made a promise under the stars. If they were both still alone at thirty-five, they would choose each other. Now Ava is a marine biologist who trusts data more than feelings. Ben is a writer who believes some promises never fade. With one year left before their childhood pact comes due, they agree to finally let it go—by actively dating other people and proving they never needed it in the first place. What follows is a year of first dates, near-misses, quiet jealousy, and truths neither of them is ready to face.