The Memory Dealer

Some photographs hold secrets. When Charlotte Voss sends a water-damaged photograph to James Montgomery for restoration, neither expects to uncover a decades-old mystery—or to find in each other a completeness they thought was impossible. James is a meticulous restoration specialist who has built his life around careful attention to detail. He restores objects to presence, bringing broken things back to visibility. Charlotte is a digital archivist who preserves the stories of forgotten people. When she asks him to restore a mysterious photograph of a woman at the Parthenon, he agrees. What emerges from the damage will change both their lives. The photograph belonged to Sophie Voss, Charlotte's grandmother's sister—a woman whose life was edited out of family history, whose story was lost to time and silence. As James restores the image and Charlotte researches Sophie's past, they discover a love story that transcended continents: a Greek photographer named Michael who captured Sophie's essence in carefully composed frames, a forbidden connection in an era that couldn't accommodate such devotion. But in recovering Sophie's story, James and Charlotte discover their own. Two people who built solitary lives around meaningful work find themselves unexpectedly drawn into connection. Yet love, they learn, doesn't always follow the paths we anticipate. Sometimes the deepest forms of it exist in the spaces between conventional relationships—in shared purpose, in mutual understanding, in the choice to help another person become fully themselves. The Memory Dealer is an intimate exploration of how we preserve what matters, how we honor the invisible lives in our family histories, and how love persists in all its varied forms. It's a novel about restoration in every sense—of objects, of memories, of the human heart. For readers who believe that meaning emerges from careful attention. For those who understand that love can transcend the categories we've been given. For anyone who has ever wanted to recover what was lost, and in doing so, discovered themselves.