Holding My Breath

She held her breath for thirty years. Then she remembered how to breathe.

Leslie Huffman is the one everybody leans on.

At work, she's the HR generalist who listens to everyone's problems with patience and a box of tissues. At home, she cooks the dinners, folds the laundry, signs the forms, and carries out the trash bag her twenty-three-year-old son walked right past. Her husband, Robert, is a good provider. Everyone says so. He has never hit her, never cheated, never lied.

He just makes comments. About the grocery bill. About the sour cream. About how much she's eating. And when she reacts, he was only joking. Why is she so sensitive?

Then one Tuesday in October, Leslie hears the garage door and realizes she's holding her breath. A few days later, a woman sits across from her in a conference room and describes a supervisor whose "jokes" have made her feel small for two years. Leslie recognizes every word.

There's no dealbreaker in Leslie's marriage. No single thing she can point to. Just thirty-one years of a thousand little things, and she is finally done swallowing them.

What comes next isn't tidy. A night in a grocery store parking lot. A list on the kitchen counter. A son who suddenly owes rent and is furious about it. A first spin class beside a twice-divorced stranger named Marley. And a phone call to her sister, Dana, after five years of silence.

Through a potluck Thanksgiving, a mother-in-law with opinions, and a family learning to see the woman who has held them all together, Leslie sets out to find the girl she used to be. The one who laughed on beaches. The one who expected good things to happen.

Holding My Breath is Book 1 of the Breath Trilogy: heartfelt, clean women's fiction about midlife, invisible labor, sisterhood, and the courage to take up space in your own life.