I teach desire for a living.

So why can’t I feel my own anymore?

After delivering the biggest keynote of my career, I should be celebrating. Instead, my business partner tells me I’m overworked, undersexed, and impossible to be around. I laugh it off—until I run into Ace, my longtime lover, and discover I somehow let five months slip by without contacting him.

Five months.

The worst part? The memories are there…but the feelings aren’t.

The chemistry that once lit me on fire now feels distant, muted, wrong. As I wander Jacksonville’s arts district searching for clarity, strange moments begin pulling at me—an old sex-club pin, provocative artwork, landscapes that seem to breathe with longing, and a mysterious photographer whose work reaches places inside me I can barely access anymore.

Something is happening to me.

To my body.

To my creativity.

To the woman I thought I understood.

And for the first time in my life, I’m terrified I may never find my way back to myself.

Shadows & Silhouettes: Before He Saw Me is a sensual, introspective prequel to Shadows & Silhouettes: Cards of Passion, featuring themes of emotional unraveling, sexuality and creativity, body disconnect, artistic awakening, and the first crack in Liv Thornton’s carefully controlled world. Shadows & Silhouettes: Cards of Passion is a standalone slow-burn grumpy small-town mountain romance.