One weekend. Two strangers. A lake nobody else is watching.
Dr. Sage Calloway has been alone in the backcountry for nineteen hours when she strips down at the edge of Lake Crescent to rinse off - and stays there a full minute longer than the cold requires, listening to the empty trail behind her.
Three days ago, she lost a six-year-old in Bay 4. She drove west from Seattle with the windows down and no music on, hiked eight miles in with a bear canister and a paperback, and set up a permitted site above the south shore of an Olympic backcountry lake she picked specifically because the loop trail was empty.
She came out here to be alone.
Then, at the tail end of a long alpine evening, boots come down the trail. Wyatt Bisset - six-three, hotshot on his off-season, hands scarred from a chainsaw and steady around a blue enamel mug - walks into her clearing to borrow a lighter. He doesn't reach for her hand when he takes it. He looks at her face when he talks, not past it. And when she says company, he sits down.
What starts at her fire, at a lake nobody else is watching, becomes a weekend she chooses on purpose. At the water's edge under a three-days-past-full moon. On a sun-warm dock in the middle of the east arm with a yellow kayak somewhere out on the water. In a two-person tent above the pebble beach, and in the careful silences between.
Neither of them makes a production of it. They're the kind of people who name things plainly, who ask before they touch, who prepare instead of assume. He's careful. She's specific. They meet each other where they are.
PITCH DARK is a slow, sensual, quiet novella about a woman who thought a part of her had gone missing - and the weekend that returned it to her, on her own terms, in the middle of the Pacific Northwest trees. It's about wanting again after months of being nothing but competent, about the low hum of a door that could open, and about the difference between someone assuming and someone preparing.
Adult contemporary romance for readers who love earned intimacy, plain-spoken characters, the specific texture of the outdoors, and a woman rediscovering her own body on her own timeline. Explicit content. Standalone. Happy-for-now ending with the door left open.
For readers of Bonnie Garmus's quiet women, Emily Henry's Pacific Northwest settings, Ali Hazelwood's slow-burn adult heat, and any hiker who has ever stood on an empty trail and wondered what would happen if someone came around the bend.
Novella · Approximately 11,500 words · Standalone · Contemporary Romance · 18+
