The Ruins of Us The House That Held Its Breath, Book 1, (Paperback)

<p>She was sent to save the house. He was the one collapsing.</p><p>Tess Kinnear is a structural engineer with a reputation for precision, a flat in Glasgow she barely visits, and a grief she carries like a stone in her chest - the kind that comes from missing your mother's last phone call because you were surveying a building in another country. When she's hired to assess Thornfield Hall, a crumbling Jacobean manor in the Yorkshire Dales, she expects rotting timber, failed load paths, and a straightforward condemnation report.</p><p>She doesn't expect Alistair Thorne.</p><p>The owner of Thornfield Hall is a former architect who gave up his career three years ago when his older brother Eddie fell from the estate's roof and died. Since then, Alistair has lived alone in the last warm room of a dying house, reading by oil lamp, pacing the corridors at night, watching the plaster crack and the walls lean and doing nothing to stop it. He doesn't want Tess there. He doesn't want anyone there. The house is failing around him in increments, and he's matched its pace so precisely that the collapse feels like stillness.</p><p>But Tess doesn't leave. She measures the cracks. She maps the damage. She crawls through cellars and climbs through collapsed ceilings and reads the building's pain the way a doctor reads a body - systematically, without flinching, with hands that know what they're touching. And as she works her way deeper into the house, she uncovers something no one expected: Eddie wasn't destroying Thornfield Hall. He was trying to save it.</p><p>Behind a sealed wall in the library, Tess finds a hidden room filled with filing cabinets, financial records, and the evidence of a man drowning in gambling debts who bet everything - including a secret second mortgage on the family estate - on a desperate plan to convert the east wing into holiday lets. The structural damage wasn't recklessness. It was the work of an amateur doing professional work, driven by love and desperation, cutting corners because the money had run out and the house couldn't wait.</p><p>And among Eddie's papers, an unsent letter to Alistair - the confession he never made, the help he never asked for, the last words of a man who went up on a roof in November to fix a leak his own modifications had caused.</p><p>As the condemnation hearing approaches and the estate's debts threaten to hand Thornfield Hall to developers who would demolish it for the land, Tess and Alistair must decide what can be saved - the house, each other, or the version of themselves that existed before they learned to stop settling for survival.</p><p>Some buildings don't fall. They wait - for someone stubborn enough to hold them up.</p><p>The House That Held Its Breath is a slow-burn gothic romance set in the rain-soaked Yorkshire Dales, where the walls remember what the people cannot say, and the only thing more dangerous than a collapsing house is the moment you stop pretending you don't care whether it stands.</p>

• The Ruins of Us The House That Held Its Breath, Book 1, (Paperback)
• Author: Colette Marchand
• ISBN: 9798235892699
• Format: Paperback
• Publication Date: 2026-05-18
• Page Count: 268