The Quiet Second: Book One of Thread Hours

Elias Ward is good at silence. It is the one skill the city of Harborline pays him for. Then, one October night in the municipal archive, a second happens twice. Days later, on a rain-soaked crossing, Elias discovers what the doubled second means: he can stop time in a small circle around himself and pull it backward. He uses it to save a child from a truck. The price is a song his mother used to sing while washing plates, cut out of him as cleanly as a sentence removed from a letter. Sera Quill, a physicist who catalogues "stutter events" nobody else believes in, finds him on the footage. Together they write the rules of a power that always sends a bill, and learn that every rescue costs something intimate: a name, a taste, a laugh, a day. Meanwhile a corporation that once tried to bottle time is watching, a man who has not aged since 1998 is waiting on the south pier, and pale things with wings have begun to feed on every loose thread Elias leaves behind. The Quiet Second is Book One of The Thread of Hours, a speculative science-fiction romance about what love does to time, and what time takes in return.