The Margins We Make
Sage Hayes
She came to catalogue the dead woman's love letters. She didn't expect to find language for herself.
Talia Byrne is very good at being useful. For forty-three years she has organized other people's stories and quietly arranged herself around what everyone else needed. Now, on sabbatical at Foxglove House — a women's residency in rural Perthshire built around a century-old archive of queer love letters — she has one month to do work that matters and feel absolutely nothing she isn't ready to feel.
She is already failing on the second point.
The woman she meets in the archive — sharp-tongued, wickedly funny, clearly hiding something — introduces herself as a travel writer. It's the wrong first impression, and Siobhan is letting it stand longer than she should. Exhausted by thirty years of literary performance, hiding behind a pen name, she came to Foxglove House to be left alone. She did not plan for Talia.
What begins between them is a slow, searching discovery of desire Talia has no vocabulary for yet. Greta Lyle's letters are holding up a mirror. Siobhan holds the terrifying possibility of being known.
But wanting something for herself is a skill Talia has never practised. And the truth Siobhan is withholding will test whether the woman she's becoming is brave enough to ask for what she needs.
Can you choose to be seen for the first time at forty-three?
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