ROSE SACRAMENTO

An Atlanta-set novel

What We
Keep in
the Dark

By Rose Sacramento

A new city. An unexpected connection. A life built around everything left unsaid.

Read the opening

Coming soon · Amazon release pending

The novel

Some secrets
make a home.
Others undo it.

Gabriel arrives in Atlanta with two suitcases, a box of books, and a relationship he is trying to leave behind. A job at a Virginia-Highland bookstore offers the possibility of a different life.

Then Daniel Mercer walks in carrying a toolbox. He is married, a father, and part of a family whose love comes with expectations he has spent his life trying to meet.

As their connection grows, desire collides with loyalty, faith, and the lives already entangled with theirs. With family rejection, blackmail, and a fatal collision woven into the story, what remains hidden carries consequences far beyond two people.

Queer desireFamily & faithSecrets & consequences

The city within the story

Atlanta.
Close enough
to start over.

Bookstores, apartments, familiar streets, and the spaces between public lives and private choices. Real Atlanta locations ground a fictional story about belonging—and the price of being seen.

01
Virginia-Highland

Gabriel’s new beginning, behind the counter of the fictional Second Story Books.

02
Piedmont Park

A familiar Atlanta landmark within reach of a new apartment and a different life.

03
Behind closed doors

The marriages, family obligations, and quiet decisions that shape what happens in public.

Begin reading

Chapter 1
The Broken Shelf

Gabriel

The shelf came down at eleven seventeen on a Tuesday, which was unfortunate because eleven eighteen was when I had intended to become a competent person.

Instead, I stood on a stepladder holding three hardbacks against my chest while a woman in a raincoat asked whether we had anything less upsetting for her book club.

Continue the excerpt

Nobody had been hurt. That was the first thing I told Nina.

The second was that the shelf had not, strictly speaking, come down. One end had separated from the wall, spilling biographies onto the floor with the efficient malice of objects that know when your employer is watching.

Nina looked at the brass bracket lying beneath a life of Virginia Woolf.

“Strictly speaking,” she said, “I am going to kill the landlord.”

The woman in the raincoat considered the fallen books.

“Do you have any cozy mysteries?”

I climbed down. “We have a whole section of people being murdered reassuringly.”

She bought two.

For adult readers. Contains infidelity, family rejection, blackmail, a fatal collision, and explicit sexual content between adults.

The author

Rose Sacramento

Rose Sacramento is the author of What We Keep in the Dark, a novel set in Atlanta that follows the intimate consequences of desire, silence, and the expectations of family.

The book is currently awaiting its Amazon release.

Meet Gabriel on page one