A slow-burn, dual-POV love story about a woman who has been the strong one her whole life — and the quiet, patient man who finally asks her not to be.

Ines Marchetti is thirty-four. She is a senior architect at one of New York's best firms. She is the daughter who manages her mother's chemo schedule from a color-coded spreadsheet, the sister who fixes her sister's broken engagement, the woman who walks into every room with her hands empty and her armor on. She has been holding everyone up for so long that she has forgotten breathing is something a body does on its own.

Rafael Costa is the contractor on her latest project. He notices things. He notices that she takes her coffee hot, black, two sugars, though she has never told him. He notices that she hasn't eaten. He notices, on a Friday in October when she falls asleep at her desk, that he can put his coat over her shoulders and leave a Post-it about the heat reset and lock the door from the inside, and not sign his name. For forty-six days, he does not ask her how she is.

And then he does.

Be Soft with Me is the story of what happens after. It is a love story, but not the kind that performs itself — it is the kind built out of small daily acts of attention, of two people learning each other across a desk in a construction trailer, of a man who waits while a woman figures out, at thirty-four, how to be loved without being needed.

For readers of Maggie O'Farrell, Claire Keegan, Bonnie Garmus, and Hala Alyan. For book-club rooms and Sunday afternoons. For anyone who has ever been the one everyone counts on, and wondered what would happen if someone, finally, counted on her right back.

Be Soft with Me is the first novel in The Marchetti Sisters series. It is a complete standalone.

Content note: This novel includes a parent's terminal illness, hospice, and grief. It contains one open-door scene of consensual adult intimacy. It is written, throughout, with care.