Synopsis
Nova Caine reads buildings the way other women read men — by their cracks, their settling, the weight they were never meant to carry. When she's hired to restore the crumbling Asher mansion on Benefit Street, she expects old brick and older money. She doesn't expect Cade Asher: charcoal sweater, a watch that doesn't ask to be seen, and a east wing he's forbidden her to touch.
He knew her name before she gave it. He hangs his own doors. And every line he draws on the floor plan is a boundary he's already walked in his head.
The house is failing. Thirty-one years past a redistribution good for thirty. And the man who lives alone inside it is failing in ways no engineer's report will name. As Nova maps the load this structure can no longer bear, Cade begins offering her something far more dangerous than a contract — the rooms he keeps locked, the silences he keeps tended, the restoration he never asked for.
Some buildings can be saved. Some men were never meant to be opened. Nova is about to do both.
