Chase Sterling always felt like furniture. The kind you don't notice, the kind that's easy to shove in a corner and forget. He was used to it: people looked right through him, brushed him off like lint. But it only takes one phone call to erase a lifetime of being overlooked. When his estranged family meets a tragic end, Chase suddenly finds himself in charge of the sprawling Sterling fortune. Turns out, riches aren't the only thing the family left him. There's a curse running through his blood, warping love into something hungry and dangerous, impossible to escape.

Vivian Ashford never set out to blow Chase's life to smithereens. Just one decision (a sharp, ruthless move at graduation) was all it took to set their worlds spinning out of control. While Vivian soaks up the Hollywood limelight and collects red-carpet headlines, Chase slips into his new role as Manhattan's most intimidating heir. But no matter how far they run, something keeps yanking them back together, like a stitch in an old wound that refuses to heal.

I start marking the months in my sketchbook the way I mark everything that matters, which is by drawing it rather than writing it, because drawings hold more information than words do, or at least hold the kind of information I need to hold, which is the quality of something rather than the fact of it.


The first month I draw two people at opposite ends of a long table, facing each other across a distance that is precise and deliberate and already not as large as it was supposed to be. The second month I draw the same table but they are closer to the center of it. By the fourth month I have stopped drawing the table.


Chapter 193 - "Monthly Meetings"