Wrenmouth, Maine & Other Mistakes

Aldric Vane sold his soul in 1723, and it was the only rational decision he ever made. Numbness was survivable. Grief was not.Three hundred years later, he arrives in Wrenmouth, Maine as a travel writer named Alan Verric - charming, frictionless, and here to steal a grimoire from a family of witches who don't know what he is. It should be simple. He's done it time and again.Then he stumbles into Nora Calloway.Nora runs the shop on Merchant Street and her magic reads the world the way a barometer reads a coming storm - pressure, gradient, the drop before the front arrives. She doesn't know Aldric is sealed shut where a soul should be. She only knows that something in her keeps registering him like weather she can't explain - nightmares that aren't hers, a prick at the back of her neck, an instrument going unreadable for the first time in years.She isn't falling for him. She's receiving him - every fragment of three centuries of grief he can no longer feel, weather neither of them should be carrying.Wrenmouth, Maine & Other Mistakes is a slow-burn industrial gothic romance about what it costs to be witnessed completely - by someone who takes in the full weight of who you were and loves you anyway. No rescue. No easy magic. Just a woman choosing, with open eyes, to carry a man's grief home to them.The institution he works for calls it an unbalanced spreadsheet.She calls it staying close.