Tom Marlowe has spent thirty-two years frozen in the aftermath of abandonment, painting the same Welsh beach obsessively, convincing himself that solitude is safety. Lauren has spent two years on the Maine coast learning to trust her own perceptions after someone taught her not to, reclaiming the music that was once made to feel like imposition.

Neither is looking for connection. Both have chosen careful distance over dangerous proximity.

Then one September evening, Tom sees a woman standing at the water's edge in his dusk. She appears in golden dawn light whilst he stands in darkness. She is translucent, impossible, separated from him by geography and time itself. When she plays a flute—The Londonderry Air, the tune his mother used to play—the melody reaches him across an uncrossable distance.

She is Lauren. She is in Maine whilst he is in Wales. She is experiencing dawn whilst he experiences dusk.

And yet—they meet.

What follows is not a conventional romance but a meditation on desire and restraint, on the difference between wanting someone and consuming them. Because Tom and Lauren cannot touch. Cannot bridge the distance through ordinary means. Can only stand at careful intervals, learning to love without possessing, to want without destroying.

Learning that some barriers exist to protect us. And some barriers exist to teach us what proximity never could.

A literary romance about healing, patience, and the radical act of loving without possession.

For readers who loved The Time Traveller's Wife and The Midnight Library

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