Between Friends

What happens to a man who has loved and lost so completely that he cannot bear to love again? Drene is a sculptor, and his art has become his fortress. Years ago, betrayal shattered him, and now he works in careful isolation, shaping marble but keeping his heart locked away. Then comes Cecile, a model whose very presence seems to recalibrate something in him she has no right to touch. As she poses for him day after day, something shifts between the strokes of his chisel and the silences between them, a tenderness neither invited nor expected. But Drene's wounded spirit cannot easily trust, especially when Graylock, his former friend whose history with Drene is tangled in the very betrayal that broke him, returns to complicate everything. Set in the uneasy peace before the Great War, this is a novel about the courage it takes to let someone in when every instinct screams to remain safely alone. It is a quiet, aching story of how love, when it comes, rarely announces itself with trumpets, more often it arrives on the stroke of a brush, in the curve of a shoulder, in the terrible risk of one more try.