Six years ago, they broke each other's hearts in a Trader Joe's parking lot. Now they're co-hosting a podcast about love - live, twice a week, in front of a growing audience that has no idea it's watching them fall apart and fall back together in real time.
June Okafor and Theo Marsh haven't spoken in six years. So when they walk into the same studio to co-host a struggling advice podcast called Dead Air - each hired without the other's knowledge - the reunion happens on air, live, mid-broadcast, with nowhere to hide.
Their producer refuses to let either of them quit. The ratings are too good, and getting better. Twice a week, June and Theo have to answer real listeners' questions about love, heartbreak, and everything in between - using the only material either of them actually has: the relationship they never got to fully understand until it was too late.
But the listener questions keep landing too close to home. Old wounds start bleeding into on-air chemistry the audience can't get enough of. A late-night fight over nothing turns into the show's most-quoted episode. And then a listener writes in asking the exact question that ended June and Theo's relationship in the first place - and this time, unscripted, on the record, in front of everyone, they finally have to say what they never said to each other in private.
Dead Air is a contemporary romance about the strange, mortifying, and oddly modern experience of falling in love - or falling back into it - under an audience's gaze, and choosing to keep something for yourselves even after the hardest part happened in public.
For readers who love: workplace-adjacent enemies-to-lovers, second-chance romance, banter-heavy dialogue, podcast/media settings, and emotionally honest happily-ever-afters.