Shattered Crowns

She survived her mother's chaos. She survived a marriage to a man who raised his hands and a landlord who put her out for it. She packed her five children into her mother's one-bedroom apartment and kept going, because that is what she does - she keeps going, because stopping has never been a luxury she could afford.

She thought she had finally learned the difference between love and a convincing imitation of it.

She was wrong.

When Celeste Monroe matches with a charming Haitian man named Édouard Pierre on a late-August night, something inside her - long denied, long compressed - stirs back to life. He calls every single morning. He remembers every detail. He drives to her on weekends. For two and a half years, Celeste builds a life around a man who is secretly building a different life entirely - with multiple women, a series of carefully managed lies, and a best friend named Jimmy whose place in Édouard's life she will spend years trying to understand.

SHATTERED CROWNS is the unflinching, intimate, and ultimately triumphant first chapter of Celeste's story - a woman who must excavate the wreckage of a fraudulent love affair, survive a near-fatal car accident that strips away her last illusions, lose her job in the same brutal season, and answer the question she has been running from her entire life: can she trust herself to choose?

For every woman who has ever loved someone who didn't exist. For every daughter still trying to earn a mother's grace. For every single mother who made dinner while her world was on fire and still got every child to bed on time.

This story is yours.