Wren Graves survived everything that should have killed her.
Freedom is proving harder.
After years spent undercover inside a world built on control, violence, and psychological conditioning, Wren no longer knows how to exist without hypervigilance. Sleep feels dangerous. Stillness feels worse. Even ordinary kindness lands somewhere between suspicious and unbearable.
Then recovery starts happening anyway.
Slowly. Quietly. In places that don’t ask anything from her except survival.
Rain-soaked bookstores. Rooftop conversations. Late night phone calls. Tarot cards that feel a little too accurate. A traveling chef with kind eyes and terrible timing. And a found family stubborn enough to keep loving her while she figures out whether she still belongs among normal people at all.
But the ghosts of her former life are still moving beneath the surface, and Wren is beginning to realize that healing may require something far more frightening than violence:
Letting herself be known.
Hypervigilance is a deeply atmospheric novella exploring PTSD, trauma recovery, eating disorders rooted in control, found family, intimacy after survival, and the quiet terrifying process of learning how to rest.
 
199 pages