US? – A Love Written in Whispers and Want

On a delayed overnight train from Paris to Rome, Mara meets a stranger who tells her, after the second glass of wine, that he is six weeks into being engaged to someone else.

They share two hours, a kiss in the dining car, and a sunrise. They part without exchanging names.

Three weeks later, he walks into the small Roman publishing house where Mara has been a translator for four years. He is the new creative director. He is wearing the same coat. He is still engaged.

The fiancée’s name is Sophie. She is thirty-two, English, careful, kind, and not the villain in this story. The villain in this story, as Mara is going to learn over the next six months, is the small specific question of what kind of woman she is going to choose to be in a room she had not asked to be in.

What follows is fifteen weeks of held doors, late-night emails, and the careful architecture of two people doing the work of not. And then — on one Friday in February, in the apartment in Trastevere that has been waiting for it — they do.

And then comes the harder part. The part the night train did not warn either of them about. The six months alone. The slow building of a man on the other side of what he has done. The slow becoming of a woman in charge of her own life. And the second-Saturday-in-August reunion that has to earn, in a city that knows them both, the answer the train was always going to be asking.

US? is a slow-burn forbidden-love novel for readers who want their love stories interior, literary, and grown-up. Dual POV. One open-door scene, fully on-page and consensual. Set in Rome, rural Umbria, Paris, Geneva, and London. The engagement is broken before the close of the book. The ending is happy. It is also earned.

For readers of Sally Rooney, Naoise Dolan, Emily Henry, Taylor Jenkins Reid, and Lily King.