A novel by Irene Lafond

​

A trauma-informed, emotionally intelligent slow-burn romance for women who have survived silence and are ready for a love that doesn’t require it.

​

This is not a story about being saved.

It’s a story about staying when disappearing would be easier.

About what happens when love doesn’t demand that you shrink to survive it.

​

Maeve Carter didn’t come to the mountains to fall in love.

She came to disappear.

Forty-one. Newly divorced.
Bone-tired from surviving a marriage where silence felt safer than truth.

So she retreats to a quiet cabin beneath the trees.

She isn’t looking for healing.
She isn’t looking for answers.

She’s looking for a kind of quiet
that doesn’t demand anything from her.

​

Then she meets Quinn Harrow.

Forty-five. Widowed. Steady in a way that doesn’t intrude or insist.

A man who carries grief without performing it.
A man who never asks Maeve to become smaller so he can feel safe.

He doesn’t chase.
He doesn’t fix.

He witnesses.

​

What unfolds between them isn’t a rescue story.

It’s a reckoning.

Because intimacy after survival isn’t gentle.
It’s exposing.

And staying present with love means neither of them gets to disappear anymore.

​

A kind of love rarely written about:

Love that doesn’t consume.
Love that doesn’t control.
Love that doesn’t erase.

Love that witnesses.

​

This book is for you if:

• you’ve survived a relationship where silence felt like survival
• you’re tired of romance that glorifies intensity, chaos, or rescue
• you crave stories where desire and dignity can exist together
• you want characters who choose themselves without hardening

​

This story doesn’t rush.
It doesn’t shout.

It invites you to stay.

Under the trees.
Inside your body.
Within your own voice.

​

Available now in eBook

Paperback coming soon.

Read instantly on Kindle or any device with the free Kindle app