THE PATIENT

His past is a crime scene. Her love is the evidence.

Willa Calloway is a trauma nurse who has spent her whole life fixing broken men. She knows the signs. The split knuckles. The old scars. The way violence clings to a body like a second skin. She's promised herself she would never fall for another one.

Then they wheel in John Doe.

He's the sole survivor of a massacre in a ghost town called Blythe. No ID. No memory. Four bodies. And when his cracked lips finally part, he speaks only one word: Clara.

A child's name. A missing girl. A pink backpack found in his wrecked car with no sign of its owner.

The detectives want answers. Willa wants the truth. But the patient wants something else entirely. And when he opens his one unswollen eye and fixes her with a gaze that feels older than the hills where the bodies were found, he asks a question that will change everything:

"Are you going to help me?"

She should say no. She should call the police. She should run.

Instead, she lies for him.

And once you start lying for a man with no name, it's hard to stop.

A grounded dark romance. A slow-burn mystery. A love story built on the edge of a crime scene.