She takes the fire off the grieving, the rage and the ruin, and banks it in her own body. She has run a fever for fifteen years, and it is never going to break.

Pilar Soler keeps a cigar shop in Little Havana cold as a meat locker and still burns from the inside, because the shop is a lie she tells to survive the gift her dead mentor left her: she draws the killing fire out of the furious and the broken, the ones a few hours from doing something no one can undo, and she carries it, and it is burning her alive by slow degrees. She has learned to live at exactly arm's length from the whole human race.

When a grief-maddened young man is brought to her on the edge of catastrophe, Pilar takes his fire as she has taken a hundred others, and this time a quiet, watchful man sees what it costs her and refuses to look away. The closer he comes, the more the questions she has spent thirty-six years refusing to ask begin to surface, about the fire she carries, the fire she came from, and whether the price of the work was ever really the price she was told it was. For the first time in fifteen years, staying may cost her less than leaving.

A sultry, slow-burning novel of solitude and heat set against a Miami summer, for readers who want their magic woven quietly through a story about being truly seen.

She has spent her whole life learning not to be touched. She is about to find out what happens when someone reaches for the heat instead of away from it.

She Who Carries the Fire

Comentarios