Ivy Rises

Ivy Marston was raised to pass every test-etiquette, scholarship, obedience. She knows how to occupy a room without taking up space, how to smile without inviting questions, how to make a life that looks correct from a distance. Then two things arrive at once: art, and a woman who sees her.

In a studio that smells of linseed and possibility, Ivy swaps footnotes for brushstrokes and learns the hard, generous work of attention. A loaf of bread becomes a study in light. A windowsill becomes a weather report. A laugh-her own-escapes unedited. With Lena, the baker whose hands translate care into something edible, Ivy tastes a future that isn't curated for her but chosen by her.

When the bakery closes for renovation and Lena disappears into another zip code, Ivy faces a quieter decision: does love evaporate with distance, or change jobs? The answer unfolds in small, exact acts-moving a painting toward truth with one violet stroke, taping a postcard to the wall, selecting "Studio Art" on a form that once read "Pre-Law." What she feels for Lena persists as attention and blessing, not ache. What she claims for herself becomes a life built from practice, not performance.

Ivy Rises is a tender, interior romance about choosing what fits when tradition asks you to wear something smaller. It is also a novel of craft-of how looking closely remakes a person. With spare lyricism and emotional precision, Iris Hartley charts a woman's passage from inheritance to authorship, from borrowed poise to honest presence.

Readers who love slow-burn intimacy, art-room atmospheres, and queer love that's as much sanctuary as spark will find a home in these pages. Ivy's story is not thunderous. It's truer than that. It's the sound of a life clicking into place.