The Long Way to Qasabi - Part One

Eleanor Hayes has been in the country for thirty-one hours when she learns the first rule of the compound: don't trust the quiet. She's come nine thousand kilometers on the strength of a feeling she can't defend to anyone sensible - and a photograph she's told no one about.

Rayan runs logistics, knows every street in the city, and refuses to drive through exactly one of them. He has a theory about sieges, a rule about not learning foreigners' names, and a reason - buried four years deep - for the route he never takes. Everyone assumes it's instinct. It isn't.

As the war tightens around them both, Eleanor and Rayan are pulled into an uneasy, then undeniable, closeness - through checkpoints and blackout hours, truces that don't hold, and a convoy question neither of them wants answered. But the past Rayan has spent four years driving around has a name, and it's the same name Eleanor crossed the world to find. When the district finally comes under siege again, he'll have to choose between the safety he's built his whole self around and the one reckoning that might finally add up.

The Long Way to Qasabi is a slow-burn wartime romance about the debts we carry, the routes we take to avoid them, and what it costs to finally go the short way home.