Nova has spent her whole life being the strong one - the peacekeeper, the helper, the one everyone leans on. Then one ordinary Friday, a name she was never meant to hear cracks something open, and the pain she has explained away for years finally has her full attention.
What she finds is a diagnosis she carried in silence, a mother whose love arrived as weather, and a pattern that runs back through every woman before her. Told in spare, body-centered prose, this is a story about what it costs to be the strong one, and what becomes possible when you finally stop.
For readers of The Body Keeps the Score who want to see that journey lived.
It is not a memoir. It is lived. Names and identifying details have been changed.
Who this book is for
- The eldest daughter who became the third parent.
- The one everyone calls strong, who was never allowed to fall apart.
- The woman whose body hurts in ways the tests cannot explain.
- The daughter of a mother whose love arrived as weather.
- Anyone carrying what the women before her carried, and ready to set it down.
- The one ready to be the place the pattern ends.
From the prologue
Before she had words, she had me. I kept what she was told to put down. I have been telling her for years.
From Chapter One
She has been fine for so long she has forgotten what fine actually feels like.
She lifted her thumb off her trapezius and could not remember putting it there. The pressure had been firm and slightly impatient, the kind she used on dough that wouldn't rise. She set her hand in her lap. The shoulder hummed anyway. It had been humming since Wednesday. Or since November. Or since the year she stopped sleeping on her stomach because the position made her breath go thin.
Chapter One · The Ache
Get your copy
The ebook arrives June 30, 2026. Paperback and hardcover follow shortly after.