Description

Autumn arrives differently in each of these six stories, but it never arrives quietly. A stakeout in a parked car turns into something neither photographer nor journalist meant to feel. A jog through an unfamiliar city becomes an argument with the season itself. A pastel-pink Smart Car becomes the site of a breakup neither party saw coming. Across Australia and beyond, six women find themselves standing exactly where the year turns, whether they’re ready for it or not.

Each story picks its own inciting break: Misty and Jesse run out of assignment days before they run out of things unsaid between them. Samantha Plimpton discovers her boyfriend drove two hours up the coast to end things, not to see her. A new bride watches her husband disappear onto a dance floor forty-five minutes into their marriage. Every ending in this collection insists on being reckoned with before anyone can move forward.

Six writers, six genres of heartbreak, one shared instinct for the moment when an ending stops being a loss and starts being an opening. Between them, the authors bring backgrounds in law, journalism, and traditional publishing to a set of stories that share a season rather than a plot. The question the collection keeps asking, story after story, is whether an ending chosen or forced on you can still become the beginning you needed.

Six sharp, distinct voices under one theme, not six versions of the same story.
For readers who want their happy endings to cost something first.

For adult readers of contemporary romance. Explicit content, 18 and over only.