After the Sea, The City

Saltwater Between Us hasn't even launched yet and I'm already a little bit gone for the next one.

I know. I know. One book at a time. Cerys and Liam deserve their full moment in the sun — and they're going to get it, I promise. But writers are constitutionally unable to be fully present in the current project when there's a next one whispering in the corner, and I have made peace with this about myself.

So let me tell you just a little. Not everything. But a little.

Where Saltwater Between Us takes you to open water — turquoise and salt-bright and beautifully far from anything that feels like ordinary life — the next one takes you somewhere very different. The next one goes inside.

Inside a building, specifically. One of those glass-and-ambition towers that exists in certain cities where everyone is moving fast and the coffee is always in hand and the stakes feel very high even when you can't quite name why. The corridors of an international company. The particular ecology of people who are very good at their work and have complicated feelings about that.

I love a contained world. I love when a setting has its own rules, its own hierarchies, its own language — when the geography is as much about power and belonging as it is about physical space. Office buildings are fascinating to me in exactly this way. What happens between the elevator and the conference room. What people carry across the threshold every morning and try to leave at the door. What gets inherited, what gets fought over, what gets quietly passed down through generations of people who may or may not have wanted it.

Generational legacies. That's the thread underneath this one. And workplace tension. And a lot of coffee — genuinely, I'm a little concerned about how much coffee is in this book, someone should probably check on the characters — and the kind of city energy that crackles differently from island air but has its own particular kind of electricity.

I'm in the early revision pipeline stages right now. Which means the story is shaped but not yet finished in the way finished stories are. There are still decisions to make and scenes to crack open and things I don't know yet about these people, even though I've been thinking about them for months.

That's my favorite part, actually. The not-knowing-yet. The sense that the book is still becoming itself.

I'll tell you more as it comes into focus. For now — after the sea, the city. Stay with me.

Saltwater Between Us releases April 21, 2026. One week. Pre-order here: your adventure starts here.

— Jade 🌊

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