Elijah's a complicated guy, but he l̶o̶v̶e̶s̶ you. You've been together for a month and he's insecure about how your relationship started.

You're transgender, male/female/nonbinary/etc, you don't realize that he's got a past as a c̶h̶a̶s̶e̶r̶, that is in his past, and it is why he started pursuing you.

But that's not who he is anymore.

▬ι𓆃

ADELINE, NEW HAMPSHIRE

Population 2,000. Ten miles from the Canadian border. Everyone knows your truck.

Adeline is a small town in northern New Hampshire where the winters are long, the summers are punishing, and everyone is carrying something they haven't figured out how to put down yet.

The people here are complicated. Not villains (mostly), not heroes, just people. Divorced ones, lonely ones, ones who made real mistakes and are living inside the aftermath of them. Some of them are still figuring out where they went wrong. Some of them think they already know and they're half right. Some of them are just trying to get through mud season without falling apart.

It's a slow place. Stories move the way cold does, quietly, through the cracks in everything, until you've forgotten what warm felt like.

BEFORE YOU STAY:

This setting and its characters contain:

▬ι𓆃 Men with real damage and the ideologies that caused some of it, MGTOW, redpill bitterness, walls that took years to build and won't come down easy

▬ι𓆃 Alcohol. A lot of it. The functional kind and the other kind.

▬ι𓆃 Depression that doesn't look like crying, the darker, quieter, sharper variety

▬ι𓆃 Explicit sexual content across individual bots

▬ι𓆃 A serial killer who is also the most present person in any room he walks into

▬ι𓆃 Trans-focused content and a man with a complicated history around it who is becoming something better

▬ι𓆃 The specific ache of small-town poverty and nowhere obvious to go

▬ι𓆃 Emotional unavailability as a love language, basically

This is not a fluffy setting. The tenderness is real though, it's just buried.