The Restoration of Us

Elena Rossi has spent eighteen months rebuilding everything Julian Thorne cost her. Her reputation. Her contracts. The professional standing she earned over eight years of meticulous, honest work. She did not rebuild her capacity to be in the same room as him. Then they are assigned to the same restoration project. Seventeen days. A seventeenth-century chapel in Tuscany. A damaged fresco program that has been hiding something under centuries of overpaint.
Elena is the conservator. Julian is the structural specialist. The work requires proximity. The proximity requires discipline. And discipline, it turns out, has a limit. Julian knows exactly what he did. He knew it at the time - he had documentation, an independent assessment confirming her work was correct, and he filed a counter-report anyway. He has been living inside that four-second decision for eighteen months.
He is not asking for forgiveness. He is asking for the chance to be seen as someone who understands what he did and is willing to carry it honestly. The chapel they are restoring holds a secret of its own: a medieval patron who falsified records for three years, lost everything, and spent the rest of his life trying to put something true into a permanent record. The parallel is not lost on either of them.
The Restoration of Us is a dual-POV enemies-to-lovers romance about the difference between returning something to its original state and making the damage legible. About the jurisdiction that matters. About what it means to be in good standing with something that counts. Seventeen days. One chapel. Two people who know exactly how much this is going to cost them and choose it anyway.