He has waited five hundred Septembers.

Brenda is a therapist who has built her whole life around a lock. Deadbolt, chain, third floor. Then a worn treatise on lucid dreaming puts her on the porch of a farmhouse that shouldn't exist — and in the doorway stands a man who says he has been there five hundred harvests, and that he is not the one who leaves.

Lucien can't come to her. Every crossing costs her something, and the distance never closes on its own. As the dreams turn into visits and the visits into a home, the questions she is trained to ask stop mattering — and the one she can't answer takes their place: what does a woman leave behind to stay?

Five Hundred Septembers is a closed-door, time-crossed paranormal romance about coercive love and the other kind, about a family found five hundred years apart, and about a threshold you only cross once.

Content note: coercive control by a former spouse, pregnancy loss, sudden death, addiction and recovery. Closed-door romance.