Rage - hope smith

What if the person who nearly kills you becomes the one who saves your life?

Mason Cross has nothing left to lose. A year after the death of his six-year-old daughter Lily, his marriage in ruins, he stands on a forty-third-story ledge in downtown Chicago, ready to end the pain that has consumed him since the world took everything he loved.

He doesn't jump.

What follows is not redemption-it's captivity. Committed to Hartwood Psychiatric Facility, Mason resists every attempt to reach him, his rage the only armor against grief too vast to bear. Until a teenage patient named Elena teaches him that survival doesn't require healing. It only requires showing up.

Released but not recovered, Mason collides-literally-with Sloane Vance on an icy February road. She's running from her own tragedy: the death of her sister, the guilt of wanting to die, the accident they both survived but cannot forget. What begins as penance becomes partnership. What starts as shared damage transforms into something neither believed possible: a love built not despite their brokenness, but because of it.

Together, they build Maya's Place-a garden where grief and growth coexist, where the bereaved find community, where rage becomes acceptance and survival becomes life. But love that emerges from trauma is fragile. Tested by floods literal and metaphorical, by the return of past ghosts and the arrival of new life, Mason and Sloane must choose their future again and again: connection over isolation, building over destruction, hope over the seductive certainty of despair.

RAGE is a deeply moving romance for readers who believe that love doesn't conquer all-it conquers with all. With everything we carry. With everything we survive. With everything we become when someone finally sees us, broken and bleeding, and chooses to stay.

"Hope Smith writes with devastating clarity about the architecture of grief and the courage required to build a life from its ruins. A masterclass in emotional authenticity."