Held Breath: A Love Story About Keeping Someone Breathing

In a city of stairwells and rooftop lines, two people try to hold a life together while the air itself feels rationed. A list of twenty rules passes between them—things to do when panic rises, when rooms get small, when the world forgets how to exhale. Clocks fall out of step. A house seems to breathe. Paper cranes gather on the sill like small, exact prayers.

Held Breath is a slow-burn literary love story about care as a verb: carrying, counting, waiting, staying. The chapters move from “Rooftop, One Minute” and “Names After Air” to “Two Clocks,” “Live Air,” and “Leaving and Staying,” tracing a year when time refuses to behave and tenderness means learning the grammar of oxygen. There is no grand rescue here—only the real work: a hand on a shoulder at the right second, a door opened before words fail, a promise kept when the easy choice is to run.

Told in clear, intimate prose, this novel honors responsibility over spectacle—how ordinary rooms can become sanctuaries, and how love survives by paying attention. If you’ve ever counted a friend’s breaths, waited out a storm on a rooftop, or learned to speak softly so someone else can rest, this story knows the shape of your heart.