Loved, Never Owned

Some things can be loved. Not everything can be owned.

Dina Zahran repairs what other people are willing to sacrifice. She learned what a rescue costs when it arrives without permission - the year her father's manuscript studio was taken in Damascus, and she was the one who made the inventory that allowed it.

Ziad AlBanna has flown from Dubai to buy her house.

The Hacienda de la Fuente has stood above the gorge at Ronda for four hundred years, and it is three months from foreclosure. He has the money to save it. She has the only hands that know how. What neither of them expects is how quickly the argument stops being about limestone.

Then Ziad pays the debt - quietly, expertly, and without asking her. He believes he has bought them time. Dina understands immediately that he has bought something else, and that the woman he claims to love was not consulted about the price.

What follows is not a rescue. It is a long, exacting negotiation between two careful people over what protection is worth when it is taken rather than offered - carried out in courtyards, quarries, notaries' offices, and one storm that nearly takes the west wall down.

A slow-burn, closed-door love story about restoration, consent, and the distance between protecting something and possessing it.

For readers of Amor Towles, Lisa See, and Chris Cleave - and for anyone who has ever been helped in a way they did not ask for.