The Story That Stole Evelyn Cross

Evelyn Cross has never believed in magic-only in ambition.

At twenty-seven, she's the youngest executive at one of New York's biggest publishing houses, a sharp-tongued powerhouse who built her empire by cutting ties and staying two steps ahead. Feelings are a weakness. Mistakes, fatal.
But the day she fires an idealistic young editor who dares to question her, something cracks. Her phone dies. Her GPS freezes. And on her way to a crucial business trip, Evelyn drives straight into a fog so thick it swallows the world. When it finally clears, she's in a city that shouldn't exist-its name missing from every map, its streets pulsing with a strange, otherworldly glow.

Desperate for help, she stumbles into a mysterious bookshop that smells of candle smoke and rain-soaked parchment. Behind the counter, an old woman with eyes like ink and starlight offers her a single, hand-bound book. "It finds those who need it most," she says.

Curious, Evelyn reaches for the book-but the moment her fingers touch it, the pages flare open, and she's pulled straight into the story itself.

Evelyn wakes in a world stitched together from fairytales and fables-a place where days never end, animals speak in riddles, and magic hums beneath every leaf. With a brave young boy and a band of talking creatures as her unlikely allies, she discovers that her only way home lies within an ancient tale of the Sun, the Moon, and a lone Star. To survive, Evelyn must face monsters both light and shadow, and learn what it truly means to care, to trust, and to love.

The old woman's gift, she realizes, might not be a curse at all-but a test. Because sometimes, when every path is lost, the heart is the only map that matters.