Unrelenting Gravity of Love

It is a contemporary romance told across two intertwined timelines set a decade apart (think a lighter Paper Palace meets workplace romance). The story focuses on the incandescent early phase of love, when hope is unguarded and every moment feels like free fall. Through these parallel
narratives, the novel explores how love shapes us, what time reveals, and the quiet,
devastating ways two people can find—and lose—themselves in each other.

As the novel uses a dual-timeline structure, each chapter takes place over a week at
work, where the emotional arcs unfold separately before ultimately converging. One
timeline follows Suri and Kai a decade ago, in the summer of 2025, when they meet as
coworkers and Kai decides that they will be friends even though they are on opposite
sides of a billion dollar construction project. The second timeline captures Suri in the
winter of 2035, shaped by time, distance, and the aftershocks of what she once was, as
she runs into her ex-husband, Rami, who finds himself trying to win her back. The two
strands move steadily toward each other in the last chapter, and converge into a choice,
the hope of new love, or the assurance of something stable and safe.

The setting of the book is unique since it explores love and relationships from the
perspective of a talented, lonely female character who is unfaithful in both timelines, for very different reasons. Secondly, the story is set almost exclusively in the shadow of a
large energy company and the conflicts at work shape the interactions between the
characters. I also believe the narrative across two timelines as it explores the early
affection in a relationship is special, since that’s the phase where love burns the
brightest.