Sometimes Lana

By: Sloane Avery

Katie Gallagher is the woman who holds it all together.

Forty-two, Fourteen years as an OR nurse in St, Petersburg, Florida. Two kids. A divorce that left her with a Kenwood bungalow, a porch that leans, and every other Friday alone in a house so quiet she can hear herself disappear.

She packs lunches. She drives carpool. She falls asleep on the couch by nine-thirty.

And then one Friday night, she walks into a bar on Central Avenue, gives a stranger a fake name, and becomes someone else. Lana.

Lana walks into rooms and makes people look at her. Lana says yes and harder and don't stop and means all of it. Lana goes home with a twenty-four-year-old - half her age - and doesn't leave her phone number.

Katie would never.

But Katie isn't here right now.

What starts as one reckless Friday becomes a double life - the nurse by day, the woman she buried by night. Two names. Two wardrobes. Two versions of herself that she keeps in separate rooms because if they ever touch, she'll have to admit that they're the same person.

Then she notices the man who's been right in front of her for two years.

He's the quiet doctor at the end of the hallway. The one who adjusts his glasses when she walks by. The one who loses his words every time she gets close. The one who's been watching her from across the bowling alley and the cafeteria and the OR door - never asking for anything, just showing up.

He doesn't see Lana. He sees Katie.

He sees the woman in scrubs at six-forty-five in the morning with her hair flat and no makeup and ten hours of holding other people's lives together written across her face. He sees the mother who packs horse pajamas and forgets to eat lunch. He sees all of it - and his hands shake.

He wants the real her. All of her.

But all of her includes the secrets, the other men, the nights she can't take back, and an ex-husband who just found out the worst possible truth at a Saturday soccer game.

Sometimes Lana is a spicy story about a woman who had to become someone else to remember who she already was. About the distance between who you are at noon and who you are at midnight. About what happens when the walls between your lives come down and you have to stand in the rubble and decide what to build next.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H36K5FR4
• ISBN13: 9798198932753
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 262 Pages
• Weight: 0.79 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.7" x 6.0"