Signals in Cold Rain

Avenport is a city built on glass and steel, and on things people choose not to look at too closely.

Nolan Mercer, 29, is an infrastructure risk auditor with an ability no one knows about: four years ago, a near-fatal illness rewired his nervous system, leaving him able to see the thermal traces people leave behind on every surface they touch. Handprints on railings. Footsteps on concrete. The ghost of a body that sat in a chair twenty minutes ago. The ability makes him exceptional at his job and quietly impossible to live with, because every crowded room is a layered archive of everyone who passed through it, and the cost of reading it is his own body heat.

When a suspicious security breach at Avenport's Central Complex points to something larger than a data theft, Nolan is assigned to investigate. What he finds, level by level beneath the city's financial district, is a structural conspiracy years in the making, and a materials engineer named Leah Merrick, whose presence does something his medication cannot: it makes the world go quiet.

Leah has her own reasons for being on this project. Her father built the material at the center of the cover-up, and she joined the investigation believing she could prove it was not the cause. The deeper she digs, the less that story holds.

Nolan is drawn to Leah because she quiets his overloaded senses. Leah is wary of Nolan because she has spent years being someone's solution rather than someone's choice. As the investigation pulls them toward a crisis that threatens the entire district, both of them have to reckon with the same question: what does it mean to stay beside someone, not because you need them, but because you want them there?

Signals in Cold Rain is a slow burn urban romance set in a cold city full of things that look healed and are not.