Self-Portrait With Hotflashes: A Midlife Romance

She spent twenty years learning how to disappear. She is done disappearing. Hannah Brent is forty-five, freshly divorced, and finally- after two decades of painting other people's living rooms the exact shade of "safe"- six weeks from her first real solo show. She's also perimenopausal, running on four broken hours of sleep a night, sweating through her own life at wildly inconvenient moments, and increasingly convinced the woman staring back from the mirror deserves an actual portrait instead of another apology. Then a stranger tries to steal her coffee order. Eric Carpe is a hedge fund manager, a devoted single dad to two kids who have his number completely, and Aman who has spent two years quietly convinced he is the "reliable" one- the guys your are grateful for, not the one you have the hots for. He gets her coffee order wrong on purpose, just to have a reason to keep taking to her. What starts as one shared table at a Bushwick coffee ship turns into Thursday dinners, paint-splattered confessions, and a slow, funny, entirely unglamorous falling-in-love that neither of them saw coming and both of them are quietly terrified of wanting. But Hannah has a lifetime of practice leaving before she can be left, Eric's ex-wife is not finished making her presence known, and the people they used to be are not quite done with either of them yet. Self-Portrait with Hot Flashes is a sensual, funny, deeply human midlife romance about the particular terror- and the particular joy- of wanting something at forty- five, when you already know exactly what it costs to lose it. - Dual POV, slow-burn romance- A heroine finding the nerve- and her sense of humor- right when she needs both most- A hero learning that steady and chosen were never actually opposites- Sensual on the page, never graphic- A full-length, standalone HEA- no cliffhanger, no love triangle, just to adults figuring it out For anyone who's ever laughed through a hot flash, cried in a gallery bathroom, or quietly wondered whether the second half of the story might turn out to be the better half.