Willa In Hiding

Willa in Hiding: Small Town Women's Fiction
(Lost and Found 3)

RELEASING JULY 14, 2026

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Willa Starling came to La Jolla to write. That’s what she tells herself, anyway. After a years-long relationship with the wrong man, Willa needs a reset. So she packs up, rents a place by the coast, and promises herself she’ll do nothing but work.

She came to La Jolla to hide. She stayed to be found.

Willa Starling came to La Jolla to write. That’s what she tells herself, anyway. After a years-long relationship with the wrong man, Willa needs a reset. So she packs up, rents a place by the coast, and promises herself she’ll do nothing but work.

But avoiding your past is hard when you’re surrounded by women who refuse to let you disappear. Harriet Langley Young and Charlie Young—two locals who have faced their own unravelings—spot Willa’s sadness from a mile away. They don’t press, exactly. But they’re persistent in the way that only people who’ve clawed their way back to themselves can be.

As Willa struggles to finish the story she’s supposed to be writing and outrun the one she’s actually living, she starts to realize that reinvention isn’t about erasing who you were—it’s about finally telling the truth.

With sharp humor and unflinching honesty, Willa in Hiding is a story about shame, second chances, and the women who help us rewrite the parts we thought were finished.

Who it's for

Recognize yourself in the characters:

THE WOMAN WHOSE EX STILL LIVES IN HER HEAD

You thought you were done with him. And you are, mostly. You've healed, made progress, and understand what it was clearly enough to explain it to a therapist or a friend. But sometimes he shows up as a voice in your head at the exact wrong moment, telling you something's not good enough, that you need his validation to trust it, that the things you made together were only good because of him.

THE WOMAN WHO GAVE SOMEONE ELSE TOO MUCH POWER OVER HER WORK

It started so innocuously. Someone believed in you before you believed in yourself, and you let that belief become load-bearing. You started writing for their reaction. Started preemptively editing your own voice to match what you knew they'd respond to. And then, when they were gone, or the relationship changed, or the approval was weaponized, you found that you couldn't hear your own instincts anymore. You'd been using someone else's ear as a compass for so long that the silence was disorienting.

THE WOMAN REINVENTING HERSELF IN A BORROWED LIFE

You've left a city, a marriage, a version of yourself that stopped working, and arrived somewhere new with a suitcase and a plan. The new place is beautiful, but you're still broken, and that contradiction is more complicated than anyone warned you it would be.

THE WOMAN WHO KEEPS PERFORMING "FINE"

You've gotten very, very good at this. You have the smile down, the breezy tone, the self-deprecating joke that makes people think you're handling things with grace. You've said "I'm fine" so many times that you've almost stopped noticing when you're lying. But there are tells, if anyone looked closely enough: the way you clean something that's already clean when you're anxious, the way you keep moving so the feelings can't catch up, the way your answer to "how are you?" is always two words or less.

THE WOMAN WHO MISTAKES BEING SEEN FOR BEING KNOWN

You want to be seen. And sometimes the hunger for it makes you a little less careful about who you let do the seeing. You've accepted attention from people whose motives you didn't fully examine because the feeling of being noticed was too good to question. You've posted things online late at night when you needed someone to witness you, and then felt hollow when the likes came in, and it still didn't fill the thing you were trying to fill.

THE WOMAN WHO FOUND HER PEOPLE WHEN SHE WASN'T LOOKING

You fled to a new city to fix yourself, to finish something, to reset...and connection was not part of the plan. But then, almost by accident, someone hands you a glass of water when you're sitting on the floor, or sits next to you on a bench and says exactly the right thing about the book in your lap, and the wall you built gives a little. Your new friends will feel like people you already know.