There is a specific reader I have in mind when I write.
She has read enough books to know what she is tired of. The romances that move like machinery — desire delivered in sequence, conflict introduced on schedule, resolution arrived at with the tidiness of a transaction. The suspense that keeps its secrets because the plot requires it, not because the characters would actually have kept them. The prose that describes feelings without transmitting them.
She is not looking for more of that.
She is looking for something that stays with her. A story that trusts her to sit with discomfort, to read the silence between two characters and understand what it means without being told. A love interest who is not explained to her but revealed — slowly, imperfectly, in the gap between what he says and what he does. A female protagonist who wants things she hasn't fully named yet, and who makes choices that cost something.
She does not need the story to be safe. She needs it to be true.
What the Mirror Knows is a book about a woman who walks into a house and finds herself already there — a portrait that should not exist, a man who already knew before she arrived, and the slow, uncomfortable question of whether coincidence is ever as innocent as it looks.
Between Silk and Secrets is a book about an art restorer who has spent her career learning to read what paintings conceal. She discovers, over the course of a commission she should have declined, that the same skill works on people — and that the man who hired her is aware of this.
What I Left Burning is a collection of five stories about women who cross a line they knew was there. Each of them knows the cost before they decide. Each of them decides anyway.
All three are on Amazon now.
If any of this sounds like what you have been looking for, I hope you find it there.
Manuela