momentise
Two women wake at the same hour, in different home, from the same dream - and neither knows the other is having it too. They've met before, in the world that doesn't officially exist.
RAY brings people out of the worst places on earth alive - the hostages, the trafficked, the ones the world already gave up on. She has won every battle and still lost the only one who ever mattered. She feels everything and shows nothing.
MILO is the brightest thing in any room, because the brightest people hide the deepest wounds. She can walk in and become exactly who you need - the funny one, the harmless one, the stranger you'd tell your worst secret to. She gives the whole world her warmth and keeps none for herself.
One of them can't feel. The other can't stop performing. Both are running from the same grief.
It begins as a road trip - two women ordered to rest, driving through a country neither ever had time to see. Bars. Diners. Border towns. Long silences that slowly stop being uncomfortable. Two people who built two very good ways of never being known, learning - reluctantly, then helplessly - to be known by each other.
But the road has a second engine humming beneath it. Because this was never just a journey. It's a countdown. Somewhere behind them is a forest, and a fire, and a name they have each taught themselves never to say out loud. And somewhere ahead is the man who engineered all of it - so charming you'd trust him with your life, so patient he has never once failed to see the whole board, and so certain of his own genius that he has never imagined these two women could take him apart.
He never accounted for what people will do for love. Or for grief. Or for each other.
"Grief doesn't leave. You only learn to set an extra place at the table for it."
A slow-burn literary thriller about the masks we build to survive and the one person who reaches past them. Comedy that turns, without warning, into a knife.