The Locke Record

Shifted schedules and anger aimed at the wrong people pile up as discrepancies a reader collects long before the wife does, and the encyclopedia has never defined the technique.

The proposal is delivered flatly as a mutually useful instrument by somebody who will not enumerate his own motives, so the arrangement conceals its own purpose.

A brother's closest friend failed to collect her for a school dance a decade back, and why he did not reframes the antagonism as two children who wounded each other wordlessly.

Radio is the sound of having been raised by somebody now absent, and the building is the last room where that person can still be found.

Two colleagues with no romantic history at all receive one by assignment, plus a briefing on their imaginary split, which turns the canon's usual device inside out.

He is the only person alive able to detect when she is performing, and he prefers her when she is not, which is a demand she has never risked meeting.

Being paid to be somebody's girlfriend is a job she excels at because becoming whatever a room requires is the skill she has practised since childhood.

Devotion to romantic comedy is inherited from a dead mother, so curating a mythology and being known turn out to be different activities entirely.

She recruits the boy next door to engineer her proximity to somebody else, and a reader who knows the films she quotes knows which of them the arrangement favours.

A Brazilian-American household turns up as a complete cast with verdicts and baking, and its rulings outweigh every professional calculation either lead has made.

An alarm pulled minutes before somebody else's vows is the introduction, and the catastrophe she causes is also the correct and irreversible thing to have done.

A partnership track and a significant client both favour attached lawyers, so the charade exists because organisations require a shape and punish anyone lacking one.

Everyone in the story wants what runs in her veins, which makes regard directed at anything else the one variable she cannot explain away.

A foretelling names her the instrument for uniting a fractured land, and the claim on her future is binding without her ever having agreed to any of it.

A chieftain's son is detailed to preserve the life of somebody his father means to expend, so guarding her and holding her are one assignment.

Raised to understand herself as an item of exchange, she audits every gentleness for the catch, and being wanted without conditions is the harder lesson.

The wedding night was always meant to be the killing, and every year of courtly training served a plan she is expected to execute on schedule.

A kingdom pledged its firstborn daughter to break a curse, so she arrives as the settlement of a debt agreed generations before she existed.

Two people who notice everything conduct their whole courtship as argument, and the grievance underneath it is real rather than performed.

She is hauled through a gateway with nobody asking, and her rage about it is granted standing while she converts confinement into leverage for as long as it holds.

Six seasons ripen a friendship at the pace adolescence actually moves, and the pair walk towards an edge neither can see and everybody reading can.

Twelve years of deliberate non-contact rest on something one of them did at seventeen, and the apology rather than the attraction is what the book has to earn.

A children's librarian's working life supplies the book's steadiest ground, and story hours and summer reading logistics do the rebuilding the romance only accompanies.

Two people the same disaster discarded divide the rent by arithmetic and share the address out of spite, which is as unromantic a beginning as the form permits.