The Ghost Draft

About this book

Ghostwriter Sloane Keller is hired to draw a memoir out of Theo Ardent, a private musician who has not spoken in public since his brother died, and who means to sabotage the book from page one. Snowed into a lake house, they write toward what each swore never to give.

She hides inside other people’s voices for a living. He has spent four years making sure no one can ever reach him again. Neither of them is ready for what happens when the truth gets written down.

Sloane Keller is a ghostwriter with a ruined name and one rule: never use her own voice again, not after a critic called her grief a product. So when she’s hired to drag a memoir out of Theo Ardent — the famously private musician who hasn’t spoken publicly since his brother died — a controlled, careful book is exactly the job she knows how to do.

Theo means to sabotage the memoir from the first page — it is the only way to keep a predatory label from seizing the last songs his dead brother ever recorded. What he doesn’t mean to do is let her in. Snowed into a lake house at the edge of the world, with a deadline closing like ice over open water, the two of them write their way toward the one thing each has sworn never to give: to be known, all the way to the floor.

Then, in the dark, Theo confesses the worst thing he has ever done and makes her promise it will never leave the room. And Sloane — who cannot stop rendering the people she loves, who has never met a true sentence she could leave unwritten — writes it down anyway.

When the confession leaks in her own words, it proves his oldest fear right and her oldest fear true, and it costs them everything. What it costs to come back is the rest of the story.

A slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers, forced-proximity contemporary romance about grief, art, the danger of being seen, and the long way home to an open door. Steamy. Guaranteed happily-ever-after.

For readers who love emotionally devastating, beautifully written love stories where the wound and the healing are earned.