Unsteady

**Author:** Peyton Corinne

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The long shadow of trauma, the quiet violence of neglect, and the unexpected ways two broken people can become each other's anchor. It is about learning to feel again after numbness, and learning to trust after a lifetime of being left.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who want a romance that does not flinch from hard things. If you love stories about damaged people finding softness in each other, about families built from wreckage, and about the slow, unglamorous work of healing, this one will hold you.

There is a particular kind of silence that follows a devastating injury. The crowd noise fades. The body goes still. What remains is the terrible question of who you are when the thing that defined you is suddenly gone. Rhys Koteskiy knows this silence intimately. He is the captain of the Waterfell University hockey team, the son of an NHL legend, a young man whose entire identity has been shaped by the ice. Then a single hit during a college game changes everything. His helmet cracks. His vision goes dark. And when he wakes up, the boy who could read a play three moves ahead cannot lace his own skates without his hands shaking. What follows is not a story about a triumphant return to glory. It is something messier and more honest. Rhys spends months pretending he is fine, hiding panic attacks and night terrors behind a carefully constructed mask of numbness. He feels nothing. He wants to feel nothing. Then a girl grabs his wrist and bends it backward, and for the first time in three months, he feels something. That girl is Sadie Brown. She is a figure skater with dreams of her own, but her life has been consumed by caring for her two younger brothers while her alcoholic father drinks himself into oblivion. She has learned to expect nothing from anyone, to rely only on herself, to keep everyone at arm's length because everyone eventually leaves. Her mother left twice. Her father is present only as a body passed out on the lawn. The only people she can count on are the ones she raises herself. Unsteady is a novel about two people who have learned to survive by shutting down. Rhys has shut down his emotions. Sadie has shut down her need for anyone. When they collide, first in anger and then in something far more complicated, they begin to teach each other what it means to let someone in. The tone of this novel is intimate and raw. Peyton Corinne writes with a close third-person perspective that moves between Rhys and Sadie, letting…