Mirror, Mirage

she was a mirror. he was a mirage. neither knew how to stop performing.

Ianna Mason has gotten very good at looking like she belongs. At school, she is the mysterious new girl with the right smile. No one knows this seventeen-year-old foster kid is secretly living out of a storage unit, working nights at a pub, and doing everything she can to make it to graduation without anyone discovering the truth.

Kiran Wells looks like someone who has everything figured out. Rich, popular, and almost impossibly capable, this senior class representative knows how to become whatever a room expects him to be.

Then Kiran discovers Ianna's secret.

An offer of dinner becomes a place to stay. A temporary arrangement becomes friendship. And friendship becomes family as Ianna and Kiran's lives collide with an unlikely group of seniors. Standing right at the edge of adulthood, Ianna, Kiran, and their friends are all trying to decide who they are when family, history, fear, and expectation have already tried to answer for them.

That's when the masks each of them rely on begin to slip, and they see what can happen when people see past the versions of themselves they built to survive.

for readers who like: friendships that become family, slow-burn connection, queer coming-of-age, complicated family relationships, and characters learning how to be known.

currently available: archive previews