ASHES ON THE LEDGER

In Belfast, every mistake leaves a paper trail.
Maeve Keenan didn’t leave the city for glory. She left to survive.
Years ago, one decision—made under pressure, made with incomplete truth—unravelled her career, her reputation, and the quiet certainty of who she thought she was. The story that followed was tidy, repeatable, and unforgiving. Belfast filed it away neatly. Maeve did the same—or tried to.
Now she’s back.
Older. Wiser. Carrying a single suitcase and a determination to live smaller, quieter, and beyond scrutiny. She isn’t here for redemption. She isn’t here to explain herself. She just wants to work, keep her head down, and rebuild a life that no longer depends on anyone else’s approval.
But Belfast remembers.
It remembers rain on red brick. Names spoken carefully. Doors that don’t open quite as easily as they used to. And it remembers Maeve.
The city’s silence presses in as she discovers that the past doesn’t stay buried—it waits. In ledgers that don’t balance. In sealed files. In questions no one asks out loud but everyone wants answered.
Then she runs into Ciaran O’Neill.
Once, he was the person who knew her best—before the fallout, before restraint replaced intimacy, before trust became something measured and withheld. Now he’s guarded, controlled, and living by his own rules of damage limitation. He doesn’t offer forgiveness. He doesn’t pretend nothing happened. He offers presence—and a truth Maeve can’t avoiding the past is no longer an option.
As long-buried details surface and old assumptions begin to crack, Maeve is forced into a reckoning she’s postponed for years. What does accountability actually look like when apologies aren’t enough? When telling the truth might cost her the fragile stability she’s built? When love, if it still exists, comes with no guarantees and no erasure of consequence?
Set against rain-slicked Belfast streets and the quiet scrutiny of a city that never forgets, Ashes on the Ledger is a restrained, emotionally precise story about aftermath, responsibility, and the courage it takes to stay when walking away would be easier.
This is not a story of rescue or easy absolution.
It’s about choosing honesty over survival. Reckoning over reinvention. And discovering that love, when it’s real, doesn’t save you from the fire—it stands with you in the aftermath.
For readers who love literary romance with emotional weight, Irish settings grounded in realism, and stories that trust quiet moments to carry the deepest truths, Ashes on the Ledger is a powerful exploration of what it means to face what you’ve done—and decide who you’ll be after.