My Silent Heart (eBook)

A Contemporary Sweet Romance

Celeste Lorentzen (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2026 | 1. Auflage
426 Seiten
Lofty Dreams Publications (Verlag)
978-0-00-113711-0 (ISBN)

Infos

When deaf cleaning attendant Alina Reed accidentally blocks a corporate elevator, she never imagines the icy-eyed CEO inside will become her sanctuary. Struggling to support her rebellious brother while navigating a soundless world, Alina has built walls of independence that no one can breach-until Owen Clarke discovers her secret rooftop refuge.

Owen's life of boardroom battles and hollow victories leaves him yearning for genuine connection. On that windswept rooftop thirty-eight floors up, he finds something unexpected: a woman who speaks through sketches and notebooks, whose silence teaches him to truly listen.

As stolen lunch hours turn into shared confidences, Owen learns sign language while Alina rediscovers her voice. But their growing connection faces obstacles-his privileged world, her fierce pride, and the ghosts of trauma that threaten to pull them apart.

From rooftop confessions to family dinners, from art studios to corporate towers, Alina and Owen must learn that the most profound connections transcend sound. In a world obsessed with noise, they discover that love's truest language is written in patience, understanding, and the courage to be vulnerable.

A beautiful story of resilience, hope, and finding home in another's heart.

Textauszug

Prologue: Where Words Don’t Reach

 

Alina

 

Silence has a weight.

 

It’s not empty. It’s full—full of the hum of the refrigerator I can’t hear, the distant sirens that flash past my window without sound, the echo of a voice I can no longer remember clearly. My own.

 

Five years. The calendar marks it, but my body knows it deeper. In the constant, watchful tension in my neck, the way my eyes dart to catch every movement, every flicker of a lip. In the scar that traces its way from my collarbone down, a map of loss under my shirt. My world is built on watching. It is a fortress of observation, and I am both its keeper and its prisoner.

 

This morning, like every morning, begins in the quiet. I move through the kitchen, a familiar dance. The click of the cabinet, the solid chill of a bowl, the sharp crack of eggs I feel more than hear. My brother, Finn, stumbles in just past dawn. I see it in his bleary eyes, the carelessness of his steps. He’s fifteen, all sharp angles and fading light. We used to speak with our hands, a clumsy, shared language. Now, he just talks at me, his mouth moving too fast, his gaze sliding away. He thinks my world is small because it’s quiet. He doesn’t understand it’s vast, and I am adrift in it.

 

I hand him a plate, his burnt toast. He grunts something that might be thanks. When he leaves, the apartment settles back into its true state: not peaceful, but hollow.

 

My job is one of invisibility. I prefer it that way. At the towering glass building where I clean, I am a ghost in blue, wiping away the evidence of other people’s lives. I don’t mind being unseen. Being seen usually means questions, impatient glances, the fumbling exchange of my notebook. Pity is a language I understand fluently, and I want no part of its conversation.

 

There’s a place, though. A secret. Thirty-eight floors up, a door to the sky. The rooftop. Not the main area, but a small, forgotten ledge atop a maintenance shed. Up there, the city isn’t a roar. It’s a painting. The noise is a vibration through the soles of my shoes, a visual frenzy of motion and light. I can breathe there. I can remember what it felt like to want things—to draw, to learn, to feel the sun without a pane of glass between us and it.

 

I keep my dreams in a small, lined notebook. Sketches of the skyline, the curve of a gull’s wing, the faded memory of my mother’s smile. It’s a silent conversation with myself. It has to be enough. It has to be.

 

Finn needs me. That is the anchor, the chain, the reason. His future is the one I pour my tired hours into, a fragile hope I’m building with blistered hands. My own future feels like a story someone else started writing and then abandoned. I don’t turn the page anymore. I just make sure there’s still paper left for him.

 

Sometimes, in the deepest part of the quiet, I feel a crack in my chest. A longing for a sound. Not just any sound. A voice that would speak directly to me, not at me. A presence that wouldn’t ask me to be anything other than what I am. It’s a foolish wish. A silent heart, I’ve learned, is meant to beat alone.

 

Then, I blocked an elevator.

 

It was a mistake, a moment of mental escape, thinking of Finn. Suddenly, a hand gripped my arm—not cruel, but firm. I turned, and the world shifted.

 

A man stood there, surrounded by others who looked nervous. But he was still. Ice-blue eyes held mine. They didn’t skim over me; they saw me. For a second, that terrifying, thrilling second, I wasn’t invisible. I was the cause of the delay, the problem to be solved. In his gaze, I wasn’t a ghost. I was a person.

 

My face burned. I yanked my cart away, my head down. The doors closed on that blue stare.

 

I didn’t know his name. I didn’t need to. He was a flash of color in my gray world, a reminder of a place where people commanded rooms simply by existing. Our lives were parallel lines, never meant to touch.

 

But for a moment, they had.

 

And the silence after he left felt different. It didn’t just feel empty. It felt… waiting.

 

Owen

 

Quiet is a luxury I can’t afford.

 

My world is made of sound: the murmur of meetings, the ring of phones, the expectations that buzz in the air like static. Silence is something I schedule—five minutes between calls, the drive home with the radio off. It’s not peace. It’s a brief pause in the noise of carrying a name, a legacy, a thousand decisions that ripple out into countless lives.

 

Lately, the pause feels hollow.

 

I stood in my penthouse last night, looking at the city glitter like a spilled jewel box. I have everything you’re supposed to want. And it’s so damn quiet at the top. The friends I have are like me, woven into the same tight fabric of business and family. The women I meet see the suit, the title, the potential. They don’t see the man who wonders if this is all there is. The man tired of conversations that feel like transactions.

 

My father built this empire with his bare hands and a ruthless heart. People say I’m like him. I have his eyes, his mind for strategy. I fear I have his capacity for stillness, for emotional distance. It’s useful in the boardroom. It’s lonely everywhere else.

 

My sister, Isla, tells me I need to “let someone in.” She makes it sound like opening a door. It feels more like dismantling a dam.

 

This morning, the silence in my apartment was suffocating. I went to work early, chasing the distraction of problems I could fix. Embezzlement in Finance. A trusted head, weak and sweating in his own office. The familiar cold focus settled over me. This was a language I understood: find the flaw, apply the pressure, cut out the rot.

 

Walking to the elevator, my mind was already three steps ahead, planning the next move. That’s when I saw her.

 

A cleaning attendant, hunched over the elevator panel, polishing with an intensity that blocked the entire world out. My assistant cleared his throat. Nothing. One of the finance managers, a woman in a garish red suit, huffed and grabbed the girl’s arm, spinning her around.

 

I wasn’t prepared.

 

She was young, far younger than I expected. Large, dark eyes wide with surprise and then acute embarrassment. Her cheeks flushed a soft pink. She looked at me, and for a heartbeat, she didn’t look away. She just… took me in. There was no calculation in her gaze, no flicker of recognition for who I was supposed to be. There was just a startled, beautiful human being, caught in an awkward moment.

 

Most people can’t hold my stare. She did. And in that brief lock, the cold focus I’d wrapped around myself like armor… it thawed, just a little. The million-dollar problem in my head receded. All I saw was the vivid red of her embarrassment, the smooth fall of her dark hair, the surprising delicacy of her features in that shapeless uniform.

 

She scrambled to move her cart. As the elevator doors closed, her eyes found mine again. They were like a shift in the atmosphere—a sudden, quiet pressure.

 

For the rest of the day, I couldn’t reclaim my earlier irritation. The memory of those eyes, that unguarded flush, kept intruding. It was an absurd preoccupation. She was a employee of a contractor. A stranger.

 

Yet, when I went to my rooftop refuge at lunch—my one truly silent place—I found myself looking at the city and wondering, absurdly, if she ever looked up. If she saw these same buildings as cages or opportunities.

 

Jayden teased me about needing to “get laid.” Maybe he was right. But the thought of another glossy, empty encounter suddenly felt exhausting. That girl’s eyes hadn’t been glossy. They’d been deep, clear pools of genuine feeling. I’d seen embarrassment, then apology, then a resilient sort of dignity.

 

I didn’t even know her name.

 

But I knew I wanted to see her again. Not to speak. Not to explain who I was. Just… to see if that look in her eyes had been real, or a trick of my own loneliness.

 

It was a reckless thought. A complication. My life is built on order.

 

Still, as I left that night, the decision quietly solidified. Tomorrow, I would go to the rooftop at one. Not because I expected anything. But because for the first time in a long time, the quiet up there didn’t seem like an escape.

 

It seemed like a possibility.

 

Alina

 

He found my sanctuary.

 

I climbed the ladder, my peanut butter sandwich in hand, and there he was. Frozen halfway up, those same blue eyes wide with shock. My heart stuttered, a frantic bird against my ribs.

 

He recovered first. He didn’t leave. He didn’t demand an explanation. He simply sat, and said, “It’s okay. You can stay.”

 

The world narrowed to the space between us, ten feet of weathered rooftop. I sat. We ate. The wind carried the scent of his coffee, the city’s distant breath. He asked a question. I reached for my notebook, my fingers trembling only a little.

 

When I wrote the word “Deaf” and held it up, I braced myself. For the awkward shift, the over-careful enunciation, the pity.

 

It didn’t come.

 

He just nodded. His gaze was thoughtful, assessing, but not changed. He saw the word,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 9.1.2026
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 0-00-113711-5 / 0001137115
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-113711-0 / 9780001137110