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He ordered her coffee before she asked. Two sugars. He'd learned it from someone else and remembered it like a fact worth keeping.
He put security on her building without permission. He moved her notebook to the nightstand while she slept. He left a note about archive hours in handwriting so controlled it looked like a contract.
Sebastian Vane doesn't say what he feels. He arranges it.
And Nora Calloway - ex-journalist, now planning literary events in London - is learning to read the language he speaks instead of the one he won't.
But there's a problem. She found a dead woman in his garden.
Cecily Rowe was twenty-seven. A restorer. Murdered beneath the rose trellis on a rainy Tuesday night. Before she died, she built a system - evidence hidden in book bindings, a cipher only decoded by touch, a phone recording of her own killer - and sent it all to one person.
Nora. A woman she met once. Because Nora noticed what no one else did.
Now Nora is following a dead woman's instructions through London's dark antiquarian underworld. Working alongside a detective who fixes antique boxes in his spare time. A grieving editor who is quietly, gracefully in love with her. And Sebastian - whose private collection is at the centre of everything, whose composure is cracking, and whose hands are careful in ways that have nothing to do with evidence.
Seventeen days. One investigation. A slow burn that starts with coffee and ends with a scar no one has ever touched.
𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐋𝐄𝐓𝐄 · 20 chapters · 43k words
For fans of Verity, The Silent Patient, and enemies-to-lovers where the enemy is your own trust.
📖 The first five chapters are free here on Wattpad.
The complete novel (20 chapters) is available on Kindle:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GTN333WG