Abigail Sterling

Turned at twenty-three in Jazz Age Los Angeles, Abby navigates the world at a careful distance from it. She watches herself from the outside more often than she lives from within — a dissociation that is both her deepest wound and her oldest protection.

Small and uncertain, she carries a book the way others carry weapons: clutched to her chest, spine cracked from repeated readings. She anchors herself to the things that hold still — pages, stars, the silence before dawn. Everything else moves too fast, or too close.