There is a specific kind of desire that only surfaces when it shouldn't — when the situation
makes it exactly wrong, when the line between professional and personal has been drawn precisely
where the pull is strongest.

*What I Left Burning* is a collection of five dark romance short stories about women who cross
that line. Not recklessly. Not carelessly. But with the full, uncomfortable awareness that what
they are doing will cost something — and the private decision that some things are worth the cost.

An auditor assigned to investigate a man she cannot read. A conservator who authenticates a
painting for a collector who is using her — and stays anyway. A court interpreter who does not
translate everything she hears. An architect who builds a private residence for a client whose
fiancée doesn't know it exists. A session musician asked, for the first time, to play like she
has already lost something.

Five professions. Five impossible men. Five situations in which professional distance becomes
the exact mechanism of desire. Each story is complete, self-contained, and ends with the
particular satisfaction of something resolved but not summarized — decided but not declared.

The heat is in what isn't said. The restraint is the point.