Talia Morgan's routine as a botanical specialist takes a chaotic turn when her partner's sleep cycles crack open an unmapped gateway inside their drafty San Francisco apartment. Every time Julian Vance?a perpetually exhausted municipal draftsman?slips into delta-wave slumber, his physical body is hijacked by alternate versions of himself. Over seventy-two bewildering hours, she is forced to manage a polished aristocrat serving breakfast in tailored linen, an intense warrior brandishing bathroom cleaning tools in mortal combat, and a paranoid operative convinced urban park birds are weaponized aerial drones.

Matters escalate when an archaic celestial bureau classifies Julian as legally deceased and schedules his molecular mass to be repurposed as highway asphalt. Teaming up with an eccentric clockmaker, Talia must wrangle conflicting personalities, navigate subterranean filing vaults, and enforce domestic order through stubborn willpower and baked goods. To preserve her relationship, she will have to prove that an ordinary mortal who respects structural building codes is worth infinitely more than emperors, conquerors, or tropical escapes.

• Defending personal boundaries in a grocery aisle using a rock-hard loaf of bread against an ancient blood feud.
• A seasoned fantasy fighter accepting peace negotiations from a transit operator in exchange for a bag of sour candy worms.
• Tactical combat maneuvers executed beneath a peony-patterned folding umbrella to survive a perceived pigeon attack.
• Vintage clockwork instruments diagnosing reality anomalies on a meter labeled Chaos Universalis.
• A cramped kitchen dispute between a melodramatic widower in mourning attire and a corporate director optimizing pasta prep.
• Banishing a swirling cosmic rift from a living area by quoting residential live-load capacity and drywall framing rules.

Grab your copy today before another version of your partner steps through the floorboards and finishes the milk!

Lyra Hartwell writes stories where cosmic grandeur collides with the cozy, chaotic reality of paying rent on time. A self-proclaimed enthusiast of charming disasters, she specializes in cross-genre fiction that blends laugh-out-loud rom-com energy with whimsical fantasy and sci-fi elements. Whether she is tangling star-crossed lovers in dimensional anomalies or forcing celestial beings to navigate the existential dread of making toast, Lyra is dedicated to one mission: proving that the best love stories are often born from the most absurd circumstances. She is the author of My Guardian Angel Is an Absolute Menace, and when she isn't writing, she's likely trying (and failing) to organize her own bookshelf.