The Eternal Rose by Sashara Jones

Sashara has spent twelve years as the steady voice on the other end of the line — the one who takes a stranger's worst five minutes and hands it back a little calmer. She is good at it. What she has never learned is how to leave that feeling at the console when her shift ends. Her husband called it a defect. When he leaves, he takes the last person who was supposed to love her for it.

Alone in a basement apartment with a storm behind her ribs, Sashara begins building a life out of almost nothing — Sunday climbs up the mountain, Tuesday nights in a friend's studio, and, finally, Helena: warm, generous, effortless Helena, who runs a cherished little wedding business called The Eternal Rose and seems to have been waiting all along for someone exactly like her.

But the pull toward Helena's Friday game nights sharpens week by week. The manuscript Sashara has been afraid for years even to want pours out of her faster than she can question it. And beneath the cut-flower sweetness of that welcoming house, something old and hungry has learned that the deepest, most private parts of a person make the richest meal of all.

She always believed that feeling too much was her weakness. It may be the only thing that can save her.

The Eternal Rose is a slow-burn supernatural suspense about empathy, found family, and the terrible cost of finally being believed.

For readers of Mexican Gothic, Bunny, and the quiet domestic dread of Shirley Jackson.