The Second Apartment

At forty-seven, Sarah Milton has finally done something just for herself. She's left a twenty-four-year marriage, rented her first apartment, and bought a queen-size bed she doesn't have to share. Now she just needs to learn how to sleep in the middle of it.

Across the hall lives Jules Brandt. Forty-five, silver at the temples, devastatingly attractive, and very particular about her rules. The photographer has spent years capturing the stories hidden inside people's homes. She doesn't photograph people. She doesn't date women who are still figuring themselves out. And she never, ever stays the night.

Then Sarah tries to build a bookcase.

One borrowed wrench leads to a gallery project, a dinner invitation, and an attraction neither woman can pretend away. For Sarah, falling for Jules means discovering desires she's spent decades explaining away. For Jules, it means risking the one thing she swore she'd never become again: somebody's secret.

Between late-night phone calls, stolen kisses, and increasingly impossible attempts to stay on opposite sides of the hallway, two women discover just how much life can change when they finally ask for what they want.

But falling in love behind closed doors is the easy part. Learning to be seen—and choosing each other without losing themselves—might be the bravest thing either has ever done.

A deeply romantic, funny, deliciously high-heat sapphic love story about bisexual awakening, starting over in your forties, and discovering that home isn't always a place. Sometimes it's the woman waiting twenty feet away.