Emergency Contact

"Emergency contact means primary. It means you're the person who matters most. And I'm never that for anyone." Silas is aromantic, an artist, and resigned to being forever adjacent in other people's lives. While everyone around them finds romantic partners and traditional futures, Silas maintains casual hookups, creates sculptures about connection, and accepts that being someone's emergency contact is a privilege reserved for people who do romance. Then Maren—a romance-positive poet with a gift for seeing what others miss—arrives at the commune where Silas lives. She leaves sticky notes on their workbench. She shows up with coffee at eight AM. She asks about their art and actually listens to the answers. Slowly, impossibly, something begins to build between them. Something that doesn't fit any category they know. When a ladder slips and Silas ends up in the hospital, everything changes. Suddenly they're forced to confront the truth: Maren is their person. Not romantically. Not sexually. But completely. What follows is a radical reimagining of partnership. Through domestic partnership paperwork, legal documents, and a fight to save their commune, Silas and Maren build something the world doesn't have language for—a life together that defies the relationship escalator, proves that chosen family can be binding, and shows that sometimes being someone's emergency contact is the most romantic thing of all. Emergency Contact is a groundbreaking queer novel about aromantic identity, platonic partnership made official, and the revolutionary act of building love on your own terms. Perfect for readers seeking authentic aromantic representation, tender queer relationships, and stories that prove happily ever after doesn't require romance—just two people brave enough to choose each other, every single day.