Sage Ferreira has been married to Hartley Dunne for eleven years. She knows the sound of his bike coming up the switchback, the ritual of his hand-wraps drying on the radiator, and the exact way his eyes drift to the window mid-conversation—the tell that means he's already gone. He's been chasing the ghost of his murdered brother for seven years, and she's been the one setting a second plate that stays cold.

On their anniversary, she lights a candle. She blows it out. She lights it again. And somewhere between the chicken going cold and her husband coming home lit up off a lead, she stops waiting.

Then a woman named Odile shows up at Sage's clinic. She knows Hartley. She knows Sage's name. And she's come to tell her the truth—that her husband has been hunting a dead man and using another woman to keep the hunt warm.

But the real wound isn't the affair. It's the years of loneliness in her own house. It's a man who was present in body and absent in every way that matters. Sage has been married to a ghost long before Odile was ever in the picture.

When Hartley finally has Creo—the man who killed his brother—within reach, he has to choose: the dead brother he's avenged for seven years, or the living wife he's made a stranger. And Sage has to decide whether a man who finally learned to be in the room is worth the risk of being left again.

A searing, emotionally brutal marriage-in-trouble romance about seven years of loneliness, a vendetta that ate a marriage from the inside, and the long, unglamorous work of learning to stay.