THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CONVERSATION

You actually believe you deleted your old message history? Adorable.

People like to think the past disappears when nobody's looking. The terrible jokes, the midnight confessions, the conversations with strangers who somehow knew us better than people sitting across the table.

Here's the bad news: databases don't know how to forget. They just break and wait for someone to fix them.

Enter Mara Ellis.

Thirty-six, a professional archivist, and perfectly content with a life that generally makes sense. Her latest assignment is to restore the damaged archive of Lantern Room, a long-defunct literary website.

To test the restored conversations, she chooses a writer calling himself TILT.

A man of questionable charm, dubious wisdom, and an apparently incurable inability to shut up at the appropriate moment.

Naturally, she can't stop reading him.

Then, beneath one of his entries, a familiar name appears.

NORTH.

Mara recognizes it immediately. Fifteen years ago, that was her.

She remembers the name. What she doesn't remember is the conversation.

And memory is a spectacularly unreliable editor. It cuts entire chapters, rearranges the dialogue, and assures you that nothing important was lost.

The archive is less accommodating. It has preserved even the private notes TILT never meant anyone else to read.

Meanwhile, Mara's best friend Jo is opening a café, discovering that furniture is considerably easier to manage than human relationships, and growing unexpectedly close to a man who keeps showing up to fix things.

Some conversations end when you close the window. Understanding them can take considerably longer.

The Other Side of the Conversation is a witty, intimate novel about memory, identity, unexpected connections, and the things we discover when we finally listen to the other side.