A Garden Between Stars by Astrid Belmont

His signature could erase her. His love must learn where to stop.

Miora-of-Root-and-Rain has spent her life protecting other people's memories. Now the station she calls home is preparing to destroy hers.

A truly nonhumanoid plant-fungal woman, Miora lives across a mobile, mineral-framed body and a protected grove. When Thallari memories begin fragmenting across Cynosure, authorities declare a suspected contagion. They offer to evacuate her mobile body—and burn the living roots that are also part of her.

She has forty-eight hours to prove them wrong.

Her most necessary ally is the man whose signature helped authorize containment. At fifty, xenobiologist and quarantine ethicist Emmett Chen knows caution can save lives. He also carries the guilt of a sterilization decision that destroyed irreplaceable alien history.

Miora needs his expertise, not his permission to exist.

As troubling discrepancies emerge, their uneasy collaboration becomes something neither expected: fascination, tenderness, and the desire for a touch they must invent together. But trust cannot grow where protection becomes control. And with the countdown tightening, a single official finding could outweigh everything they discover.

To stand beside her, Emmett must learn where his authority ends. To let him close, Miora must discover that being loved does not mean becoming completely known.