Where The Moss Grows Back

Some people meet and it's loud. Fireworks, declarations, the whole performance.
Amara and Luca meet in a library. A dropped book. A few lines of handwriting that weren't meant to be seen. Two sentences that change everything:
It's really good. Don't do that thing where you close it.

Amara Brooks has spent four years perfecting the art of disappearing. Since moving from Portland to a small coastal town in Oregon, she's learned that being quiet means being easy, and being easy means being loved. She hides her poems in library books. She makes herself smaller every year. She tells herself this is survival.
Luca Alvarez-Klein builds things so they'll stay. Furniture, mostly. Sometimes boxes. He keeps a ketchup packet and a blue marble and a pen from the morning his father left - proof that things happened, that they mattered, that the before-version of the world was real. He came to Harlow Bay already decided to leave it.
They recognize each other before they know each other's names.
They are both people who learned to survive by becoming less of themselves.
But together - quietly, incrementally, in the white space of library books and late-night texts and a garage that smells like something being made - they become more.
Where Moss Grows Back is a story about two people who meet at exactly the right time and exactly the wrong moment. About the poetry you hide and the things you keep and the specific cost of loving someone before you've finished learning how to stay.
About what it means to take up the space you actually occupy.
About walls, and bright fragments, and the sky on the other side.