A bed-and-breakfast for the brokenhearted might hold the key to another chance at love in this achingly hopeful debut romance.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt Ellen O’Clover’s The Heartbreak Hotel, which releases on September 23rd 2025.
Louisa Walsh emerged from a tumultuous childhood with a degree in counseling, a wealthy boyfriend, and her sunny outlook on life mostly intact. But that optimism is tested when she’s dumped and left unable to afford rent on their gorgeous house in the mountains of Colorado. Even with her life in disarray, Lou knows losing the one stable place she’s ever called home is not an option.
Her plan: ask her reclusive landlord, Henry Rhodes, to let her stay for free in exchange for renting out the house’s many rooms as a bed-and-breakfast. She’s shocked when he agrees to her terms, and even more surprised to discover Henry is a handsome thirtysomething veterinarian with silver at his temples and sadness in his eyes. One who does not take it well when Lou starts marketing her B and B as a retreat for the recently heartbroken.
But as the Comeback Inn opens its doors to its weary, hopeful guests, Lou and Henry find themselves dancing around both their undeniable connection and the closely held secrets that threaten to topple this fragile new start. A chance at love, here, could be too close to home…or it could be exactly where their hearts finally heal.
It happens past midnight, in a fluorescent-lit room. I’m shaky with adrenaline and not a little bit sweaty. I’m having trouble hearing.
“Louisa,” Nate says, an edge to his voice like he’s repeating himself. “What did you honestly expect?”
Not this, honestly. Not Nate, who’s only ever called me Lou, pulling out Louisa like a weapon. Certainly not the mottled bruise along the sweat-ringed neckline of his T-shirt, evidence of someone else’s mouth.
“We’ve been so scared to call this what it is, but it’s actually obvious, right?” He keeps talking, the end of every phrase turned up like a question he expects me to agree with.
I let his voice haze out, become wordless as I watch his lips move: the freckle just off-center of his Cupid’s bow, the thin white scar from his near-feral childhood cat. He raises a hand to scrape his fingers through his hair, fidgety, then tugs at the leather bracelet slung around his left wrist. I made it when I was twenty-three and briefly consumed by handicraft.
Bad timing, I think he says. Less than ideal. He starts fid- dling with things on his dressing room desk: a haphazard stack of picks, a tin of cinnamon breath mints. The set list is taped to the mirror, Purple Girl (Acoustic) highlighted yellow. He opened with it tonight, not making eye contact with me where I sat in the VIP section, and for once I didn’t sing along.
“Say something,” I finally make out. A demand, halfway pet- ulant, as Nate turns to face me. He’s always been this way: de- fensive when he’s wrong, made accusatory by his embarrassment. “You owe me a response, here, at least.”
“I owe you?” My voice surprises me, like this is a scene I’ve been watching from a distance and I’m disoriented to hear my- self in it. Someone whoops from the hallway—Kenji, maybe. Nate’s drummer. Everyone else is packing up to go home, or go out. But I have the paralyzing feeling that I’ll never exist outside this moment again. “I don’t think so.”
“No?” Nate tips closer to me, and I bite the insides of my cheeks so hard I taste iron. “After six years, you don’t have a single thing to say?”
Six years. Six years. Six years.
I do have one thing to say. When I tilt my chin upward, Nate tracks the movement like a sniper.
“Don’t think for even half a second that you’re keeping the house.”
He blinks, surprised. It’s a victory, however small, to shock him.
And it’s what I’m thinking of, as Nate Payne—my first love, my first everything—dumps me backstage at his own concert. Not the humiliation of being cheated on right under my nose.
Not the fallout when the press learns that Louisa Walsh—Nate’s purple girl—is out of the picture. Not even the anticipatory shame of telling my mother, my sister.
It’s this, simple and salient:
I cannot lose that goddamn house.
