Close Reading (Lavender House #1)

Two professors, three kids, two dogs, one coffee shop, and a whole winter of almosts.

Margot Voss is precise, private, and hasn’t let anyone close in twelve years. Priya Anand is warm, brilliant, chronically late, and the first person to tell you when you’re wrong.

When their university pairs them for a research project neither of them volunteered for, they recognize something in each other immediately… and spend the next five months pretending they don’t.

Between faculty meetings, school pickups, and long afternoons at Lavender House, the distance keeps closing. The work is manageable. What’s happening between them is not. Someone will have to say it.

Close Reading is an introspective slow-burn sapphic romance about two single mothers in their forties and what it costs to be known.

It’s Book One of the Lavender House Series, set in Millhaven, a Pacific Northwest college town with a queer coffee house at its heart.

Slow burn · Forced proximity · Found family · Dual first-person POV · Character-driven · Open door