Built to Hold

by Sarah Silver · Neurodivergent Romantasy

Halwen Farren is a structural assessor who reads buildings by touch. While the Guild's standard method runs on measurements and calculations, Halwen's runs on her hands — chalk, wax pencils, tuning rods, and the spatial intuition that has never failed her. What she can't do is the math. The dyscalculia she has never disclosed to the Guild means every filed report is a quiet act of survival: find a workaround, produce the numbers someone else's way, keep the license. She has built an entire career around being the best assessor no one fully understands. The Guild sends her to Druith — a dying harbor island where a mining company is tunneling toward something it doesn't know is there. Her assignment: assess the oldest structure on the island and sign off on the permits that will let the demolition proceed. The building won't cooperate. And neither will the man inside it.