Restoration

In the seventh year of the Republic, America has been remade. Marriage has been redefined by law, identities erased by paperwork, and survival reduced to the performance of compliance. Adrian Cole teaches electrical theory at a state-approved vocational school in Nashville, where the lessons are monitored, the students are watched, and the wrong answer on a moral readiness form can end a life.

Adrian has spent seven years making himself invisible. His husband Noah is gone - processed, reclassified, and buried in a government file marked deceased/unconfirmed. The wedding ring Adrian still carries beneath his shirt is, under Republic law, unlawful attachment material.

When a student named Marcus Vale begins asking questions that have nothing to do with circuit diagrams, Adrian is pulled toward something he swore he would never risk again: connection. And through Marcus, toward a resistance network operating in the spaces the Republic cannot fully see - decommissioned utility buildings, church ledgers, salvage manifests, and the eight seconds of blind time a contraband relay can buy at a checkpoint.

Restoration is a novel about what survives erasure. About the difference between enduring and living. About the people who keep records when the state destroys them - a mother who witnesses a marriage no one will recognize, a bureaucrat who reclassifies cruelty one form at a time, a boy who learns that anger is not the same thing as resistance.

At its center is a love story told in stolen moments and electrical metaphor: two men in a world that has made them impossible, choosing each other anyway.

Told with precision and restraint, Restoration asks what it costs to name what you love when naming it gives the state something to take - and what it means to answer that question with yes regardless.