110,360 Words

STAR CHILD Some inheritances cannot be explained by science. This literary speculative fiction novel follows generations of a hidden lineage that may not have originated on this planet, wrapped inside a slow burn romance, a coming of age story, and a search for justice that ordinary evidence can never provide. Cassidy Hollis trusts her doctors until her own blood test returns an anomaly that threatens to unravel a secret her mother has kept for decades. The discovery leads her to David Morrow, a man who shares her impossible lineage and the quiet burden of hiding it. Romance builds slowly between them, shadowed by questions neither can yet answer. Cassidy and David's daughter, Eleanor, inherits a gift beyond genetics. Emotions reach her from everyone nearby, objects reveal their history at a single touch, and a lie registers before the words finish. Eleanor never projects what she feels, only receives it, and that boundary shapes every choice she makes as she grows from a watchful child into a guarded young woman. By twenty-two, Eleanor works as a legal transcriptionist, invisible in courtrooms where her extraordinary perception carries no weight as evidence. When she teams up with a journalist investigating a case built on secrets no one will speak aloud, Eleanor's abilities become the only lead that points toward the truth, and the only kind of proof the law will never accept. A mother's hidden test result and a daughter's impossible sense of the world carry one bloodline's secret across two generations, ending in a fight for a truth no court will accept.