Dead Load

Every building has a breaking point. So does every rule.

Structural engineer Noa Callahan is sent to Pittsburgh with a single mandate: condemn the Harlan Building. Armed with precise measurements and an unyielding methodology, she is prepared to close the book on the decaying seventy-year-old steel structure. What she isn't prepared for is a historic ice storm that traps her inside for seventy-two hours with the man fighting to save it.

Cade Morrow is a rugged ironworker whose family built the Harlan, and he refuses to watch it fall. As forty tons of ice press down on the roof and the temperature plummets, Noa and Cade are forced into a tense, claustrophobic survival protocol. But as the structural stress of the building rises, the professional boundaries between them begin to fracture.

Will Noa stick to her calculations and condemn his legacy, or will the ironworker prove that some structures—and some hearts—are built to carry the unexpected?