When a total stranger knows what eats you, maybe they are your one true love. Even if you don't know it yet. || On Friday the 13th, two twenty-something, Daya and Mike, end up in a mutually beneficial arrangement: she is his caregiver after he breaks his foot; he provides room&board to help her out with a teeny-tiny cash flow problem. Not a whiff of a romance, strictly business. And for a while, all is good... for about five minutes, that is. What can an overweight man, a video game obsessed librarian, know about her quitting a challenging sport of figure skating, Daya scoffs. He needs to get off her case and sort out his binge eating! What does a celery-chewing skating diva care about his failure as a PhD candidate, Mike wonders. She is just replacing her dreams with his non-existing problems instead of pursuing her one true passion! With the two already teetering on the brink of mutually assured destruction, oil splashes onto the flames when Daya resumes her never-ending quest for skating triumph at Canadian Nationals. (Well, that should make Mike happy, right? Right?) But isn't there *something* worth fighting for *together*? Like, you know, love? COMPLETED. First Published: August 19, 2019 Trigger warning: This story contains themes of eating disorders and body image insecurity (male).

Bronwyn Larson has spent her whole life not depending on her mother, a constantly recovering addict, until the moment her life was literally torn apart when an EF4 tornado ripped through their trailer park and her mom is found dead, miles away after the storm. Suddenly, her estranged father is a part of her life, a prominent state senator who's been absent since Bronwyn was born, a product of her parents' secretive affair. After living alone with her mother in a trailer for seventeen years, Bronwyn now has a stepmother and four new siblings, including an older brother and sister who seem skeptical, if not actually disproving, of Bronwyn living with them. While staying with them in their vacation lake house an hour away from what she called home, Bronwyn is hit with the bombshell that her mother's death is being treated as suspicious, with injuries inconsistent of being killed during the tornado. Estranged from everyone she knows, except her estranged new family, Bronwyn doesn't know who trust or who to believe about her mother's death. Torn between her life as the daughter of a single drug addict and the middle child of a well-respected senator, all while learning more about the mother she thought she knew, Bronwyn is forced to navigate through this new unfamiliar life alone, with this gut feeling she has. That her mother's killer isn't unfamiliar. 𝐓𝐎 𝐁𝐄 𝐏𝐔𝐁𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐇𝐄𝐃 𝐌𝐀𝐘 18th 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟏 𝐓𝐇𝐑𝐎𝐔𝐆𝐇 𝐖𝐀𝐓𝐓𝐏𝐀𝐃 𝐁𝐎𝐎𝐊𝐒 Cover designed by Ashley Bandy