Masked · Book 1 · Stuart Corlett
The Cost of Keeping Secrets
We all show different faces to different people. What happens when the person you love no longer knows which one is yours?
On San Francisco’s waterfront, Danny Mercer makes strangers laugh without saying a word. To his friends, he is generous and quietly dependable. To Elena, he is the man she loves—and a man whose silences she can no longer explain.
Before the white paint, there was another life. When someone from that past returns, Danny’s instinct to protect begins to look dangerously like control. Keeping Elena safe may mean telling her the very things he has learned to hide.
As old loyalties tighten and the distance between them grows, Danny must confront a question that reaches far beyond his own performance: which parts of us help us belong, and which keep us from being known?
A novel of love, loyalty, and the cost of the faces we wear.
Read before you choose
Chapter 1 — A suitable wind
The wind stole Danny Mercer's hat at eleven seventeen, which was six minutes before he had intended to lose it.
He watched it roll toward the waterfront with the expression of a man whose entire pension had been invested in felt. A little girl stopped it beneath a yellow sneaker.
Danny approached on tiptoe. The girl lifted her foot. He bowed to the hat, considered its injuries, and attempted to put it on. It no longer fit. Something terrible had happened to his head.
The girl giggled.
He tried his elbow. Perfect.
Her father, who had been watching his phone, put it away.
Danny liked the moment when the father put his phone away. He waited until the man was looking before reaching into his empty coat.
He offered the girl an invisible flower. She accepted with care.
“Does it need water?” she asked.
Danny considered. Too much responsibility for a flower he had invented. He indicated rain, sunshine, and an occasional biscuit.
“Flowers don't eat biscuits.”
He looked wounded. Neither, apparently, did her father, who declined an invisible one. Danny ate it himself and discovered that it was far too large. His cheeks bulged. He required considerable invisible tea.
The father laughed. It was a tired laugh that arrived late and surprised its owner.
Danny offered the girl a cup. She took it with her free hand, keeping the flower upright. He had given her something to hold and she was holding it. He would have to remember to take the cup back.
An older woman using a walker had stopped at the edge of the gathering. Danny made a second flower, smaller this time, and placed it where she would not have to reach. She shook her head at him, smiling.
He pretended it was the finest blossom he had ever grown. Then he looked at the girl's larger one with sudden professional embarrassment.
“You can have this,” the girl told the woman.
Danny had prepared an appalled look for the unequal flowers. He let it go when the woman held out her hand.
The father helped his daughter understand where the woman's hand was waiting. The flower passed safely between them.
End of sample · © Stuart Corlett
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