Toll for Tenderness

In a world where love is forbidden, emotions are taxed, and feeling too deeply can cost you your life, tenderness is a dangerous luxury.
Marigold has spent her entire life learning not to feel. Raised in a society that punishes emotion and traps its citizens in carefully regulated bubbles, she knows better than to linger on desire or connection. But one stolen moment of eye contact on a sunny afternoon is enough to send her watch into a frenzy and drain her bank account, forcing her to run from the very thing her heart reaches for.
September 26th, 1936. Kansas City, Missouri. On the eve of her eighteenth birthday, amid the weight of the Great Depression and a nation suffocating under loss, Marigold begins to question the system that governs her life. If love was never allowed, how did her parents have it? Why are emotions punished now, and who decides the price of feeling?
The answers come the morning she turns eighteen, in a letter left on her porch. She has been matched with her soulmate. His name is Victor. He will arrive at six o'clock. And the state is watching.
As Marigold prepares to meet a boy she has never known yet somehow already feels tied to, she must decide whether tenderness is worth its toll and whether love, once found, can survive in a world determined to erase it.