OSAs
When a leaked single threatens to end her career, pop star Rhea Santiago is forced into a PR-engineered relationship with Cole, a guarded ghostwriter secretly paying off a debt he refuses to explain. Their contract has strict rules, no real feelings, cameras only, an end date, but forced proximity turns performance into something neither of them planned for. Behind it all is Evelyn Cross, the label president’s wife, who discovered Rhea years ago and believes she still owns her success; Cole’s carefully buried past turns out to be tangled in Evelyn’s control too, and unraveling it costs both of them dearly before they can trust each other for real.
What follows is decades, not months: marriage, children shaped by the wounds Rhea and Cole carry from their own childhoods, the identity crisis of loving someone whose fame or usefulness threatens to swallow you whole, and the slow work of becoming parents neither of them had. When Cole is finally diagnosed with a terminal illness, the book’s real question comes due, not whether love can defeat death, but whether Rhea can survive losing him and still call her own life whole. She does. Not because he saved her, but because he helped her discover she could save herself.
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