The First Move

"She was writing," Val tells herself afterward-not what she was writing, just that the woman near the fire door had a notebook and wouldn't explain it, and that Val had walked back into the room and hadn't looked back once. She'd done it on purpose. She was already thinking about the first move.

Valentina Cruz has built her life on precision. At thirty-four, she is a razor-sharp civic attorney in Chicago-brilliant in depositions, effortless at fundraisers, master of the calculated gesture that opens doors without forcing anyone through them. She has never met a room she couldn't work, a conversation she couldn't navigate, or a problem she couldn't move toward with elegant, controlled confidence. What she has never had is someone who made her want to slow down.

Bex Obiora is six feet one, quiet as architecture, and entirely indifferent to the rooms she is paid to secure. A former college linebacker turned nightclub and event security guard by day, she is, privately and without anyone's knowledge, a poet-writing sestinas in a red notebook she carries against her ribs like a secret, filling fixed forms with the truths she cannot say any other way. She has spent twenty years becoming expert at the one skill that keeps her safe: leaving before anyone gets the chance.

When Val finds Bex near a fire exit at a charity gala and a conversation starts that neither of them planned, something shifts in both of them. Val pursues the connection with the same strategic intelligence she brings to everything else-but Bex is the one person she cannot outmaneuver, the one problem that doesn't resolve when she moves efficiently toward it. And Bex, who has catalogued every reason to be careful, who has watched herself build something rare and real with Val and watched herself begin, again, to prepare the exit-finds herself facing the choice that has defined her entire adult life: run first, or stay.

The First Move is a slow-burn contemporary romance set in the civic and literary world of Chicago, told in alternating close third-person perspectives. It is a story about two women who are both, in their own ways, very good at the wrong things-and about what it looks like when the form you've been practicing your whole life turns out to have been practicing you.

Will Val's instinct to pursue become the thing that pushes Bex away? And will Bex learn that staying is not the same as losing control-before the first move she's most afraid of becomes the only one left to make?