Be Soft With Me: A Novel
"You don't have to be strong with me."
For readers of Maggie O'Farrell, Bonnie Garmus, and Claire Keegan - a slow-burn love story about being witnessed for the first time.
Ines Marchetti is thirty-four, a senior architect, and the woman everyone in her family counts on. She closes the deals. She builds the spreadsheets. She manages the chemo schedule for her dying mother from a binder she made herself, because no one else was going to.
Rafael Costa is the contractor on her latest project. He brings her coffee, hot, black, two sugars - though she has never told him how she takes it. He brings her lunch when he notices she has not been eating. He puts his coat over her shoulders when she falls asleep at the desk. For forty-six days, he does not ask her how she is.
And then, on a rainy Wednesday in November, he asks.
What unfolds is not the romance Ines was expecting. It is something quieter, and far more dangerous: a man who is not trying to fix her, save her, or chase her - only to be the man who is still there when she finally lets herself fall apart. As her mother's illness deepens and the carefully-built armor of Ines's life begins to crack, she must learn the most difficult thing she has ever been asked to learn:
How to be loved without being needed.
A book-club novel for readers who love:
Slow-burn, deeply emotional contemporary romance
Dual POV told from both partners' perspectives
Stories about caregivers, grief, and the quiet work of falling in love
Literary prose that reads like a letter from a friend
Characters who heal each other without rescuing each other
Be Soft with Me is the first novel in The Marchetti Sisters series. It can be read as a complete standalone.
Content note: This novel includes a parent's terminal illness, hospice, anticipatory grief, and one open-door scene of consensual adult intimacy.
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