Every kindness leaves a print. It warms, it bruises, it lingers. Tess Lin has always felt the small weather of other people, a prickle at the back of her neck when someone nearby is hurting. When her mother uproots them to Harbor Ridge, a salt-bright town with a cracked seawall locals call Breaker’s Stitch, Tess finds a heart-shaped weather glass in a dented sewing tin. It fogs when a feeling is too big for one person to hold.
Looking for hours to graduate and a way not to fade, Tess joins Gentle Hearts, a quiet mutual-aid group run out of a peeling bungalow on Lemon Street, the Wicker House. They deliver groceries to shut-in neighbors, write letters to elders at the Alderview home, and stock a free pantry with tins and tea. There Tess meets Rafi Calder, who draws maps of places that might exist if you believe in them long enough, and Sana Bhatti, a reporter for the Harbor Ridge Beacon who thinks secrets sink faster than stones.
On the night market’s first Friday, under lanterns strung between the ferry dock and the bait shop, a stall hands out envelopes of unmailed words. Tess opens one addressed to her grandmother, Mei Lin, pressed with rosemary and written in a looping blue hand. The letter leads her to the Granite Light Maritime Museum, where a shuttered exhibit labeled Tender Dispositions hides a cabinet of cassette tapes recorded decades ago by teenagers promising to "do no harm and take no burden without asking." When Tess listens, the weather glass blooms white, and the voices braid into a tide she can nearly name.
As a storm season gathers over Breaker’s Stitch and the past knocks like driftwood against the present, Tess uncovers that her mother once spoke into those tapes the night a friend was lost to the current. With Rafi and Sana, she walks the seawall chalking hearts where the concrete spiderwebs, asking for consent from families to archive the tapes in a small, living library they call the "Listening Room" at the Wicker House. But some in Harbor Ridge would rather the water keep what it took. Tess must decide how to carry the weight she’s invited to hold—to be soft without disappearing. Will she keep drawing the boundary that lets gentle hearts keep beating, or open the floodgate that could drown them all?
