Blue Hour Without the Moon: A Seattle women’s-fiction novel about a lawyer, an architect, and the moment she chooses herself

A deleted Instagram post. A vanished moon emoji. A marriage that refuses to confess.

Charlotte Pierce built her life on evidence. As a high-stakes family lawyer in Seattle, she knows how to turn chaos into clean paper. But when her architect husband’s “client dinners” with hotel heiress Serena Lockhart begin to look like headlines, Charlotte does the one thing she’s always told her clients to stop collecting proof and start collecting boundaries.

One rule becomes thirty days. Thirty days become a petition, a courtroom, and a settlement that refuses to humiliate either side—but will not keep her small. As the city gossips and the copper-glass hotel gleams, Charlotte trades spectacle for ink, decency for clarity, and finds herself negotiating a future that includes late-night jazz, a steady-eyed new client named Julian Hale, and a version of home she buys with her own signature.

Taut, smart, and unexpectedly romantic, Blue Hour Without the Moon is a razor-clear portrait of modern love, public optics, and private courage. It’s for anyone who has ever stared at a screen, weighed a promise against a pattern, and chosen to step through the only door that mattered—forward.

Themes readers women’s reinvention • messy marriage truths (no melodrama) • legal/courtroom texture • slow-burn possibility after divorce • big-city atmosphere (Seattle) • crisp, witty voice and cathartic ending.