Today is the last free day for The Gift in the Hills, and I’ve been watching the numbers rise quietly — thirty downloads, then a few more.
I keep thinking about what that means. Not “sales” or “reach,” but the fact that thirty strangers somewhere in the world chose to open a story that came from my silence.
When I wrote The Gift in the Hills, I wasn’t trying to write a love story. I was trying to write a moment — the one where loneliness finally meets tenderness and doesn’t know what to do with it.
It’s strange how hard it is to accept what we’ve longed for. That’s what this story became for me: a quiet experiment in courage.
If you’d like to read it, it’s still free till midnight. After that, it returns to its ordinary life on Kindle.
Thank you to everyone who downloaded, shared, or just stopped by. You made the beginning feel real.
There’s something about the hills that silences people.
Not the noisy kind of silence — the one that follows fights or betrayal — but a deeper, quieter one. The kind that settles into your bones when grief goes too long without being named.
I know that silence. I’ve lived with it. I’ve built a life around pretending it wasn’t there.
This story — The Gift in the Hills— didn’t come out of ambition or a publishing dream. It came out of that silence. It came from years of loving people who don’t know how to say sorry. From being the kind of woman who remembers everything — every pause, every birthday no one celebrated, every meal eaten alone, every night spent convincing herself she was strong enough not to need anyone.
It’s not a love story in the usual way. It’s about the kind of love that returns after fifteen years — not to ask for forgiveness, but to give it.
It’s about a man who never stopped remembering her. And a woman who stopped remembering herself.
We all have people like that — ghosts of the living, strangers we once loved, versions of ourselves we buried just to survive.
The Gift in the Hills is for every woman who left — and wonders if she mattered. It’s for every man who realized too late that she wasn’t difficult, she was in pain. It’s for everyone who’s ever driven back into memory and wished they could rewrite one moment. Just one.
I don’t know who you are, reading this. But if your chest feels heavy right now — if something aches and you don’t know why — maybe this story is for you.
Read The Gift in the Hills – Free on Kindle till October 14
If you’ve ever loved and lost without closure… If you’ve ever been the strong one for too long… Come sit with this story. It won’t fix everything. But it might make you feel seen.
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