When everything shatters—her marriage, her future, the shape of the life she thought she wanted—Kate starts spending her nights at Afterglow, the narrow little coffee shop that stays open past midnight. The chipped mug, the dim light, and the wobbly back-corner table become her makeshift lifeline… until the night she finds someone else sitting in her chair.

Silas is all hoodies, ink-stained fingers, and tired eyes, with a laptop full of half-finished songs and a past that’s left more scars than he admits. What begins as two strangers sharing a table slowly unfolds into something deeper:
napkin notes passed back and forth, teasing observations, quiet confessions about grief, divorce, miscarried dreams, addiction, and the families that failed them both.

As Kate and Silas trade stories and silences across that stubborn little table, Afterglow turns into more than a late-night refuge. It becomes the one place where she can breathe without pretending she’s fine—and where he can fall apart without being asked to be strong. When a crisis with Silas’s brother rips open old wounds, Kate is the one he calls, and the night they learn how to breathe through the panic together changes everything.

In the months that follow—hospital visits and hard conversations, recovery that is anything but linear, a cupcake for “Unmarriage Day,” songs written in waiting rooms, and kisses stolen in the glow of café lights—they discover that healing isn’t a clean slate. It’s a slow, imperfect becoming.

Somewhere between coffee and midnight, between bruised and mending, between fear and choosing each other again and again…

They stop just surviving their lives
and start building a home in each other.

A tender, character-driven love story about grief, second chances, and the quiet magic of the person who simply keeps showing up.