For forty years, books have gone missing from the Hollow Pine Library on the dark of every new moon - and come back a fortnight later in flawless condition, annotated in an elegant hand no one can place.
Wren Hapgood finds the pattern in a dead woman's card catalog.
She came to Hollow Pine to disappear. One scandal, one ruined name, one quiet exile to a town whose entire economy is a monster it doesn't believe in. She did not come here to fall for a stranger's handwriting in the margins of borrowed books - the arguments with dead authors, the grief pressed into the gutter of a page, the truest mind in three counties living entirely between the lines.
So she does the only sensible thing. She leaves a note on the windowsill. And on the next dark of the moon, she waits up to catch whatever has been borrowing her books.
What she catches is Asher.
He is the last of his kind - the thing the festival prints on its t-shirts, the red-eyed legend the gift shops have been selling for decades - and underneath all of it, a desperately well-read, catastrophically lonely man who has not spoken aloud to another soul in forty years. He would, he informs her with great dignity, very much like to keep his library card.
He cannot walk in daylight. He cannot be photographed. He cannot pass for anything but what he is. For forty years that was enough to keep him safe and unknown - until a cryptid-hunting streamer with eight hundred thousand followers and a thermal drone rolls into town for festival season, chasing the one clip that would prove the Mothman is real.
Wren has kept a secret to make herself vanish before. She knows exactly what it costs. The question is whether she can keep this one and stay a whole, named, wanting person while she does it - and whether a creature who has only ever been seen, and never once known, can let himself be chosen out loud, in the light, at the front door.
A cozy, slow-burn monster romance - grumpy-and-sunshine, hidden identity, found family, and a love story that begins in the margins of a borrowed book and ends on the doorstep. Small-town warmth, gateway heat, and a hard-won happily ever after. Hollow Pine, Book 1. A standalone with no cliffhanger.
