You've had the thought, probably at a moment you'd rather not admit to. Is this real, or is it just the situation?
Some of us met someone during a bad year. A deployment, or the 8 months when everything was coming apart and one person kept showing up anyway. And later, when the year ended and nothing was on fire anymore, the question arrived: was any of that about them, or was it about the pressure we were both standing in?
Most people never find out. You can't run the experiment. You can't lift yourself out of your own life, take the fear away, and check whether the feeling survives without it.
Fiction can. That's most of why I read it.
The books that get this right
Think about Holden and Naomi in The Expanse. They're the only warm thing in a solar system that's coming apart, and every quiet minute they get is stolen from a universe that would rather they didn't have it. You feel the theft. That's why it lands harder than it should.
Outlander does something meaner. Time, war, and geography keep prying Jamie and Claire apart and shoving them back into the same small room. They stay together because survival requires it. And that raises the question the book refuses to settle for you: how much of this is love, and how much is the only door that was ever open?
Then there's Red Rising, which is where this stops being comfortable. Darrow is living a lie so complete that telling Mustang the truth would kill them both. So you spend two books doing arithmetic the characters can't. Every tender moment carries a second question underneath it. What happens when she finds out?
Put two people somewhere that's actively trying to end them, and everything between them gets louder.
All three stop short of the same place. The world lies to these people, and the people lie to each other, and their own hearts are still their own.
I wanted to take that away.
So I wrote a woman who can't trust her own heart
Technomancer is my book about a priestess named Elara who arrives in our world under a compulsion. A spell was worked on her, against her will, and it drives her to find a man of power and deliver him to the man who cast it.
The man she finds is Finn. He takes her in, and instead of using her, he starts trying to break the spell.
And she falls for him.
Elara can't tell whether any of it is hers. The spell wants her close to Finn. She also wants to be close to Finn. From the inside those two things produce the same feeling, and there is no test she can run and no priestess she can ask.
You can guard against a person who might be lying to you. You can't step outside your own head to check the wiring.
There's a stretch late in the book where she's alone on a road, running, turning it over. She remembers two kisses. The first she had already forgiven, because he'd only done it to hide them both from the people hunting him. The second one she never had to forgive, and that's the one that frightens her. Was it hers, or did the spell make it hers? Then she remembers waking and sneaking into his bed, and the comfort she felt there. How could a spell counterfeit that?
She doesn't get an answer. She gets one sentence, and it's the sentence the whole book is built on:
If only she could trust her feelings.
Where to start
Technomancer is on the site, and the first chapter is free to read. If Elara's question is one you want to sit inside for a few hundred pages, that's the book.
Start with a free account at charlieforet.com. It costs nothing and it opens the free stories. It's also how I let people know when the next one is coming.
Then, if the first chapter has you, Technomancer is available direct from the store.
