Archivist

Every night I pour two cups of coffee. I drink one. I can't remember who the second one is for. Eleanor Hart keeps the past for a living. Thirty-one years old, conservator at a city archive, steady hands, tidy life. She can tell you which clerk forged which signature by the way he crossed his sevens. She can authenticate anyone's history except her own. For a dozen years she has told herself that's just a poor memory. Then a dead stranger's estate arrives at her counter. Seven boxes. In the bottom of the seventh, under the last bundle the inventory accounts for, she finds a notebook. Dark red cover. No accession number. Full, front to back, in her own handwriting. And on three different pages, in three different inks, pressed hard enough to score the paper: If you ever find this, don't believe anyone who tells you it never happened. Three days later there's a new guard in her building, hired for a break-in that left no report. He knows how she takes her coffee. He knows about the thin white scar on her wrist, the one she rubs when she's lying. He knows, without being told, never to touch the back of her neck. And when a grey sedan runs her little car through a canal barrier at night, Lucien Armand is already on the road behind her, reaching through the window before the water closes over the roof. He's been watching her for a thousand and forty days. He is the safest place she has ever stood and he is standing exactly where her missing years should be. Because the only man who can give Eleanor the truth is the man who helped her disappear. She can't trust her memory. They built it that way. But paper doesn't love anyone. Ink doesn't flinch. Somewhere in this city is a file with her real name on it. Eleanor Hart is done being the only person she's never been allowed to read. They erased a frightened girl. They left the archivist. Their mistake. THE ARCHIVIST is a dark, slow-burn romantic suspense with dual POV: amnesia, a lethal protector who has watched too long, forced proximity, a forbidden love built on the one lie he can't take back and a heroine whose competence is the weapon. Explicit open-door scenes, adults only, consent on the page. Book One of The Archivist series. Standalone story, no cliffhanger, HEA. Content warnings: memory manipulation and gaslighting, involuntary medical sedation (non-sexual), on-page violence and injury, murder, grief, references to a childhood witnessed crime (strictly non-sexual), explicit sex between adults.