❄️ Coming Soon: Midwinter’s Eve (Preview 2)
✨ A coming-of-age love story sparked in a bookstore built around a tree, rooted in wonder, and shaped by the days that feel small until they change everything. 📅 First chapter arrives September 7th
Growing up isn’t marked only by milestones.
Sometimes it’s measured in glances that last a little too long, in conversations that start by accident and end up changing everything.
By the time Nicolas and Eve found each other, they were already carrying the weight of growing up: his restless belief, her steady reason. Both still searching for who they might become.
And then, in a bookstore built around a tree, they met.
An ordinary day.
An extraordinary beginning.
Here is the moment they first meet:
The bookstore didn’t look like much from the outside.
A crooked sign. One dim bulb over the door. The kind of place people walked past without realizing it was still open.
Nicolas wandered in on accident. Or at least that’s what he’d tell himself. He wasn’t looking for a book. He wasn’t even looking to read. He just liked the quiet. And the smell. And the way time slowed down in places like this, like it had to tiptoe.
The shop wrapped around a living tree.
Not a wooden column designed to look like one, a real, sprawling oak that rose from a cut-out circle in the floor and reached all the way to the skylight above. Its branches stretched like arms across the ceiling, twined with twinkle lights and the occasional paper star. Around its base, a ring of benches curved inward like a quiet amphitheater. Cushions leaned against the roots. Someone had even tucked a flannel blanket between the trunk and a stack of poetry books.
It was absurdly charming. Like a storybook fell asleep and forgot to wake up.
Nicolas wandered in on a Tuesday.
He wasn’t looking for anything.
Not really.
He’d just left his job for the day, if you could call it a job. Administrative assistant at the same place his dad had worked for two decades. Hired without an interview. Kept on because he was “a good kid.” The kind of position that came with polite smiles and backhanded compliments like, “You’ve got that creative energy, huh?”
He hated it.
But he showed up. Punched the clock. Took his lunch break.
Which had ended twenty minutes ago.
Still, here he was, not quite ready to go home and not quite willing to go back.
He drifted toward the drama section, fingertips brushing over the bindings of plays he’d read in high school. Death of a Salesman. The Glass Menagerie.
Then he saw it.
Into the Woods.
His favorite.
He pulled it from the shelf with both hands, reverent in a way he wasn’t ready to admit. He flipped it open to the prologue, then closed it again like it was something sacred.
Movement caught his eye.
Across the store.
She was sitting beneath the tree.
Not beneath a poster of a tree. Not in a reading nook designed to feel magical. No, she was actually beneath the tree, cross-legged on the wooden bench, her shoes kicked off beside her.
A notebook rested in her lap. A pen twirled slowly between her fingers.
She wore a deep green cardigan over a black tank top, jeans with a small rip in the knee, and wire-framed glasses that slid down the bridge of her nose every few minutes, which she pushed back up with the tip of her knuckle.
She didn’t write constantly. She just sat there, calm, still, twirling her hair around one finger as she read what she’d written and tilted her head, like she was waiting for the page to talk back.
There was something about the way she looked at the words.
Like she expected them to reveal something.
Like she believed they held secrets.
Nicolas watched for a second longer than he meant to.
Then looked away, fast, back to the play in his hands.
He tried to flip to a random page, to give his eyes something else to do, but the book was upside down.
Of course it was.
He turned it the right way, shook his head, and smiled, mostly at himself.
When he looked up again, she was watching him.
Not just glancing.
Watching.
Their eyes met.
She didn’t smile.
Not yet.
She just tilted her head slightly. Curious. Appraising. But not unkind.
He gave a two-finger wave.
Tiny. Embarrassed.
She smiled.
He looked down at the book in his hands: Into the Woods, dog-eared, annotated, familiar, and then glanced toward the tree.
Without letting himself think too long, he walked over.
Not to her directly, that felt too forward, but to the bench. The other side. A respectful distance. Not far. Not close.
He sat down.
Opened Into the Woods in his lap.
Didn’t read a word.
She didn’t look up.
But she smiled again, just slightly, as she scribbled something in the notebook.
He glanced sideways. Not directly at her. Just enough to catch the way her brow furrowed when she focused, how her mouth moved as she silently reread her own words.
Then:
“You’re holding that upside down,” she said, still looking at the page.
He blinked. Looked down.
He wasn’t.
He grinned. “Not this time… but earlier, yes... Very convincingly.”
That got a laugh.
A small one, but real.
She looked up. “So what’s that one?” she asked, nodding toward the play.
“Into the Woods,” he said. “Favorite of all time. Not just because of the music. Because it gets honest at the exact moment you expect it to lie.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You quote that often?”
“I keep it in my back pocket in case I stumble upon attractive women under fictional trees.”
She raised an eyebrow, amused.
“You’re lucky I like fictional trees,” she said.
“Lucky is a strong word,” he replied. “I’ve been rehearsing this conversation for years.”
She laughed, open now, head tilted back just a little.
Then she stood.
Walked slowly to the other side of the bench, closing half the distance between them.
Sat.
Notebook still open. Hair still twirling. Pen tapping.
She didn’t say anything else.
Just let the moment settle between them.
Nicolas looked down at the play in his lap.
Then at her.
Then she said, gently, “I’m Eve.”
He blinked once, like she’d just said something more important than a name.
Then: “Nicolas.” A soft nod. “Nice to officially meet you in the fairy tale section.”
Their eyes held for half a second longer than necessary.
And then they both looked down, at their books, at the floor, anywhere else.
“You know,” he said glancing down at his book, “there’s this moment where the Baker’s Wife sings ‘Moments in the Woods,’... and it wrecks me every single time.”
She studied him curiously.
“Because it’s about choosing real life over fantasy… but also wondering... why we’re asked to choose.”
She smiled.
“And you relate to that?” she asked.
“I think...” he said slowly.
“… I’m still stuck between the trees.”
Eve smiled again.
This time, wide.
And this time, it felt like the story had already started.
✨ Midwinter’s Eve is a coming-of-age love story about wonder, belonging, and the way two people can find in each other what they didn’t even know they were missing.
📅 The first full chapter arrives Sunday, September 7th.