Set in your neighbourhood gym is a story of two souls living a life of broken, confused, and hurting hearts.
Miranda is a young, working woman, struggling to get over past nightmares that left her scarred. These nightmares sneak back into her life every time she tries to move on.
Audrick, on the other hand, is a successful but lonely businessman, whose past failed relationship left him hurt and angry.
When these two lonely hearts set eyes on each other, there’s an instant pull between them from the very first day – Feelings more potent than anything they could have ever imagined.
However, as much as they yearn for each other, life’s intricacies and their haunted pasts–made even worse by the emergence of a deadly pandemic–keep pulling them apart, leaving them at parallels. What chance do these yearning hearts have to make those parallel lines meet?
Set in your neighbourhood gym is a story of two souls living a life of broken, confused, and hurting hearts.
Miranda is a young, working woman, struggling to get over past nightmares that left her scarred. These nightmares sneak back into her life every time she tries to move on.
Audrick, on the other hand, is a successful but lonely businessman, whose past failed relationship left him hurt and angry.
When these two lonely hearts set eyes on each other, there’s an instant pull between them from the very first day – Feelings more potent than anything they could have ever imagined.
However, as much as they yearn for each other, life’s intricacies and their haunted pasts–made even worse by the emergence of a deadly pandemic–keep pulling them apart, leaving them at parallels. What chance do these yearning hearts have to make those parallel lines meet?
PROLOGUE
A
As soon as her head hits the pillow, her eyes shut, then dark lucid circles start appearing. They are zigzagging. First, it is the light-headedness, then the dizziness. Her bed feels like it is spinning right below her, while her head hangs upside down. There is ringing in her ears, and she shivers all over as the feeling overwhelmingly takes over the world around her, blocking out any signs of life beyond what she is seeing behind closed eyelids.
She’s numb. She can’t move a muscle, now locked in a moment she can’t escape. She is terrified as those dark circles, with the smallest particles the closest, and the biggest the furthest away, get larger and larger. Not just in size, but in number as well, seemingly millions of them, creating a huge and endless wall.
It’s all darkness around her as the circles now move away, creating this enormous hollow space that encompasses her whole body and surroundings. The ringing in her head won’t stop, her shivers get worse while she hangs in the emptiness with nothing around or below her.
Her chest heaves as she struggles to catch some breath. But it feels like someone is holding a pillow over her head, blocking off her air supply. She is moving her head from side to side,
vii trying to get back control of her body, to kill the emptiness in front of her, and to break free. But everything is in vain. She can’t open her eyes to get rid of the blank image. Her cries are all internal, and no sound comes out at all.
Near lifeless and fatigued, she gives up, and lets whatever monster of a moment that this is take its toll until it passes. Usually, she has no awareness of how long this goes on, a few seconds, maybe a few minutes? And then, just like that, like someone suddenly switches on the light and pokes her back to life, it all disappears.
She would always be worn out and tired, shivering all over, confused, and scared. But at least now she can feel her body and all her senses again, relieved that there was nothing more to it but the darkness.
The shivering will stop, and her breathing will return to normal as long as she stays still, relaxes, and forgets about it. That usually means a sleepless night, because she is terrified of closing her eyes again for fear of returning
Miranda has faced a lot of trauma in her life, and she can’t seem to escape the past no matter how hard she tries to move on. Audrick might be successful in his career, but his past relationship makes it difficult for him to move forward.
But when the lives of Miranda and Audrick intersect, their connection sparks a bit of hope in each of them as they are drawn together, only to be pulled away again by their pasts and unforeseen circumstances.
I struggled to get into this one. The first half of the book had me wondering what the point was. Switching back and forth between past and present, and the introduction of several characters, often became confusing and difficult to keep up with at times. I assumed at some point Miranda and Audrick would meet, but it just seemed to take longer than necessary to get there.
The flow of the story was also difficult for me to get into. In some ways it felt rushed - one paragraph talking about something in the present, only to flip to a memory from the past and then the story seemed to move on to the next thing. While I appreciated the backstory of both Miranda and Audrick, I wish more of the story focused on their interactions with each other and eventually falling in love. Their story together also seemed rushed.
I also did appreciate the idea behind the book. It is a story of two people’s haunting pasts and how fate seems to find a way to bring them together, even when the circumstances made it seem impossible. I just wish it focused more on their developing relationship. There really wasn’t much build up from their first meeting to them falling in love, so it was difficult for me to really feel the connection between them.