The Choice I Owe My Heart

Standalone contemporary romance (triangle love). A hospice nurse torn between the safe love she walked away from and the life-changing music that woke her up is forced to decide what kind of story she wants to live. "The Choice I Owe My Heart" is a full-length, emotionally rich triangle love romance about grief, second chances, and the quiet bravery of staying awake in your own life. Lila knows how to hold other people's stories. She just has no idea what to do with her own. By day she is a hospice nurse, quietly moving through corridors where every room holds someone's last chapter. She is the one who adjusts pillows, chases pain relief, listens when relatives are too afraid to ask questions. For years she believed that being good at this work meant shrinking everything else—her ambition, her doubts, even her love life—to fit around it. When she accepted Miles's proposal, it felt like the natural next step. He was steady, kind, ready to build a life. The problem was that somewhere between saying yes and buying a dress, Lila stopped recognizing herself. Then Jasper arrived at the hospice as the son of a dying patient, and later on a concert hall stage. His music cracked something in her that had been numb for too long. Lila did not fall in love with him so much as with the version of herself she saw in his world: braver, more alive, less obedient to everyone else's plan. In her confusion, she did the only thing she could imagine to feel honest again. She broke off the engagement and walked away, leaving Miles holding a ring and a pile of questions. Months later, the consequences of that decision catch up with her in the most literal way. The hospice asks Jasper to return and perform at a fundraiser; Lila is asked to speak about narrative medicine and the emotional cost of caring; Miles accepts an invitation to attend, still uncertain whether he is there as her past, her maybe, or something else entirely. Under the harsh glow of hospital strip-lights and the softer warmth of a lecture theatre, the triangle she thought she had escaped becomes impossible to ignore. "The Choice I Owe My Heart" follows Lila as she begins a formal narrative medicine course, starts story circles for exhausted colleagues, and slowly learns to let her work, her love life, and her own inner voice speak to each other instead of fighting for space. Therapy sessions with Dr Collins force her to admit that she has been more comfortable chasing intensity than staying through the boring, necessary work of commitment. Time with Miles reveals a man who has grown his own backbone and is no longer willing to be chosen by default. Encounters with Jasper teach her that some people enter our lives not to be our forever home, but to force us to question the foundations we are standing on. At the heart of this book is a simple, difficult question from a dying patient: "What choice do you owe your heart?" For Lila, the answer is not a dramatic move to another country or a secret affair with an artist. The answer is a series of real-world decisions that allow her to live with her whole self: committing to a relationship where both partners get to be fully human, stepping deeper into the work that matters to her instead of hiding behind busyness, and letting her parents see the adult she actually is. This is a contemporary, realistic love triangle that refuses to turn anyone into a villain or a saint. It is about second chances after a broken engagement, about the way grief reshapes what counts as important, and about learning that a chosen, ordinary-looking life can be the most radical thing you do. If you are drawn to slow-burn, emotionally intelligent romance where hospitals, music, and hard conversations share the page with tenderness and humour, "The Choice I Owe My Heart" will stay with you long after you close the book.