Her Name on My Lease

She needed a roommate. She found the love of her life. She just didn’t know it yet—because she’d spent thirty years not knowing she was gay.

Marin Vega is twenty-eight, tattooed, and freshly destroyed. Two years with Sloane taught her that love is a weapon, vulnerability is a trap, and the only safe place for desire is inside a sketchbook no one will ever see. She needs a roommate to afford her Brooklyn apartment. She does not need another disaster.

Claire Whitmore is thirty, put-together, and performing. She’s spent four years with a man she doesn’t want, a decade in a career she’s good at but doesn’t love, and her entire life building a version of herself that looks perfect from the outside and feels like nothing on the inside. She needs a fresh start. She does not need to fall for her roommate.

But the apartment is small. The walls are thin. And when a thunderstorm knocks the power out and they’re alone in the dark with candles and wine and a decade of unasked questions, the performance Claire has been maintaining since she was fourteen starts to crack. Because the way Marin looks at her—the way Marin has been drawing her, in secret, in a sketchbook filled with forty-seven studies of her hands—is the way no one has ever looked at Claire before. Like she’s worth seeing. Like she’s worth staying for.

What follows is a love story built in a too-small kitchen and tested by everything: an abusive ex who won’t let go, a dream job three thousand miles away, four days of devastating silence, and a three-thousand-word love letter read aloud from a sketchbook at two in the morning. It’s the story of a woman learning to trust again and a woman learning to be herself for the first time—and of the apartment that held them both while they figured it out.

You’ll love this if you enjoy:

✓ Roommates-to-lovers with a slow burn that ignites during a thunderstorm
✓ A thirty-year-old woman’s queer awakening (she was gay before Marin—she just didn’t know it)
✓ An artist who draws her roommate in secret and reads the sketchbook aloud as a love confession
✓ “I turned down Portland three days ago—I chose you before you chose me”
✓ An abusive ex confrontation scene where the survivor names every tactic
✓ The thin walls heard everything (and the neighbors definitely know)
✓ A kitchen table that barely survives the lease-signing celebration
✓ Explicit sapphic heat with deep emotional intimacy (10 sex scenes)
✓ A joint lease with matching engraved keys
✓ A gallery show called Her Name on My Lease with twelve portraits of their love
✓ Guaranteed HEA with a theoretical cat and a spreadsheet