The Supernova Effect

Authors note/ teaser

Hey y'all!

If you've been here since the beginning and made it here through all the name changes new covers and revised plots, I just wanna say thank you for sticking it out with me. Thank you for walking beside these characters through their pain, their silence, their survival, and their joy. This story was never just about love. It was about the things love reveals. About how hard it is to stay not just for others, but for yourself. And how sometimes, the softest promises are the ones we fight hardest to keep.
This story is not over, the next book is called Nuture and it'll be centered around Nasrin's story and will be released this November so stay tuned!

With love always, Natalie.

NURTURE TEASER
—

My mother always said flowers were fickle things. That beauty was a performance. And softness was only safe if you knew when to sharpen it. I believed her, until the night she didn't come home. That's when I learned, nothing dangerous ever blooms quietly or without a cost.

If my mom could be a flower, she'd be belladonna. Beautiful and witty, but toxic enough to poison your blood. A beautiful woman. People used to use its berries in potions, to make their eyes shine, to feel something sweeter than reality. But too much, and it stops your heart.

My mom loved beautiful poisons too, except hers came in a bottle, a pipe, or needle.
Now it's just me. And Alex, And the garden that refuses to die even when I want to burn it down.
I pinch a sucker shoot off the basil, and my fingers come away smelling like summer. The kitchen window barely opens, and the paint around the sill flakes like old pastry — but the basil doesn't care. Its roots have found whatever goodness is left in this tired pot of soil.

The rest of the apartment smells like lemon cleaner and soft dirt. I keep it that way on purpose — so I don't forget what the shop used to smell like before everything fell apart.

A secondhand oscillating fan clicks each time it turns its head, like it's scolding someone.

The apartment is more jungle than home. Pots crowd every surface: thrift-store terracotta, chipped mugs, buckets I drilled holes into myself. Ivy spills down the bookshelf like it's trying to escape. Mint takes over the counter. Even the bathroom has a fern above the showerhead that likes the steam more than I do. It's cluttered, humid, alive — like a stripped-down version of the shop. Like it moved in here with me when the landlord changed the locks.

I grow things because it makes sense: water, soil, light. Give them what they need, they grow.
I used to think people worked the same way, that if I gave them enough, they'd stay alive too.
Turns out, they don't.

Alex coughs from the couch, the kind that sounds like a door refusing to latch.

I look up. "Inhaler," I say, without turning it into a question.

"I know," he mumbles, fishing it from under a comic book. He takes two careful puffs, eyes on me over the plastic like I'm going to nag him anyway.

"Better?"

He inhales. Then nods. "Tastes like old pennies."

"That's the vintage. Very exclusive," I say. He cracks a grin.

I slide the basil aside and line up the terracotta pots like soldiers. Mint. Thyme. Rosemary. Good, stubborn plants. The pothos above the sink throws down vines like it's trying to escape. On the table, next to a bowl of bruised pears, a paper with FINAL NOTICE for my flower shop in red is trying to look important — and succeeding.

"Rivers & Wild." That's what it was called. My shop. My garden. My little corner of softness in a city that didn't know what to do with things that couldn't be tamed. It wasn't just a job — it was the first thing I'd ever built that didn't fall apart when I touched it.