Some stories stay with you.
Even in the dark.
After her mother’s death, Cora returns to the small-town bookshop she once planned to escape from — determined to keep her head down, sell the shop, and leave before the grief swallowing the place can swallow her too.
Then the lights start going out.
Every blackout brings Ellis Hargreaves back through the door.
The town electrician is quiet, broad-shouldered, and entirely too observant for Cora’s liking. He fixes fuse boxes at midnight, brings coffee she never asks for, and looks at her like he can see every exhausted, lonely part she’s trying not to unravel.
And in the dark, it becomes dangerously easy to let him.
But grief has a way of making ghosts out of people, and Cora knows better than to mistake comfort for something lasting — especially with a man who makes staying feel dangerously possible.
Set in a rain-soaked bookshop filled with old stories, soft lamplight, and the kind of silence that says too much, After the Lights Went Out is an emotionally intimate small-town romance about grief, healing, and falling in love when you least know how to survive it.
Some stories stay with you.
Even in the dark.
After her mother’s death, Cora returns to the small-town bookshop she once planned to escape from — determined to keep her head down, sell the shop, and leave before the grief swallowing the place can swallow her too.
Then the lights start going out.
Every blackout brings Ellis Hargreaves back through the door.
The town electrician is quiet, broad-shouldered, and entirely too observant for Cora’s liking. He fixes fuse boxes at midnight, brings coffee she never asks for, and looks at her like he can see every exhausted, lonely part she’s trying not to unravel.
And in the dark, it becomes dangerously easy to let him.
But grief has a way of making ghosts out of people, and Cora knows better than to mistake comfort for something lasting — especially with a man who makes staying feel dangerously possible.
Set in a rain-soaked bookshop filled with old stories, soft lamplight, and the kind of silence that says too much, After the Lights Went Out is an emotionally intimate small-town romance about grief, healing, and falling in love when you least know how to survive it.
