by Mason Deaver
First published 2026
Owen Henson had it all: a tight group of friends who felt like chosen family and a boyfriend, Jacob, who could make his pulse spike just by entering a room. Then Jacob left for a research team in North Carolina, and Owen's world cracked apart. A year later, Jacob shows up at their friends' Christmas party looking infuriatingly good, and before Owen can process that, the whole group gets surprise-booked onto a six-day, seven-night cruise up the West Coast to Alaska. Six days. Seven nights. One ex who keeps showing up at every shuffleboard game and glacier lookout. Jacob makes things worse by asking for something Owen never expected: friendship. Owen agrees, mostly out of stubbornness, but the Alaskan coastline has a way of wearing people down. So do late-night deck conversations and cruise-mandated activities that keep throwing them together. Owen's walls, carefully built over twelve months of hurt, start to give. Mason Deaver, a bestselling and award-winning author, brings trans representation to the center of this second-chance romance about two people deciding whether the wreckage of a relationship is actually the raw material for something better.
Genres: fiction, romance, contemporary, adult, contemporary-romance
Vibes: bittersweet, emotional, heartfelt, hopeful, intimate
Tropes: forced-proximity, found-family, friends-to-lovers, second-chance-romance
Setting: North Carolina, West Coast, Alaska
Period: Christmas
352 pages · Paperback · Avon Books