The Shadow After 71.3 Seconds

Some rhythms don't come from the world. They come from somewhere older.

Elias Ward fixes refrigeration units for a living. He also feels a pulse behind his sternum every seventy-one point three seconds - a rhythm his body has always known, though nothing in his life has ever explained it.

Nadia Marchetti is an astronomer who trusts evidence over feeling. When she discovers a star burning with the light of two different ages at once, she refuses to call it anything stranger than data - until the impossible keeps happening anyway.

As a second sun appears in the sky, then a third, then a fourth, Elias and Nadia fall in love in the middle of a world quietly losing its certainty about how many suns it's allowed to have. Then a stranger finds Elias on a street corner and says four words that unravel everything: the woman you love should not be alive.

THE SHADOW AFTER 71.3 SECONDS is a story about a love that has already happened forty-eight times before - and a truth that's been hidden from the person living it for just as long. As the seventh sun rises, and an eighth, impossible sun tears open behind it, Elias and Nadia must face what's actually been counting down inside him his whole life, and what it will cost to finally let it end.

For readers of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, and This Is How You Lose the Time War.

Some endings arrive on schedule. This is the story of the one that finally didn't.