Ravi_Kumar_Reddy_4518

The House Across the Lane
A novel of hidden desires, bold awakenings, and the women no one saw coming.

Maple Lane is quiet. Picturesque. A place where porch lights flicker on exactly at dusk and the scent of lemon pie mixes with trimmed hedges and gasoline. It’s a neighborhood that prides itself on appearances — and silence.

But behind those closed doors, the women are changing.

Claire Turner, newly divorced and quietly unraveling, thought she knew what loneliness felt like. Until she looks across the street and sees Gloria Whitmore—elegant, unreadable, and entirely unapologetic. What begins as cautious curiosity becomes something else entirely when Claire steps into Gloria’s home... and finds a world she never imagined existed.

A circle of women — neighbors, wives, even mothers — are waking up from lives lived on auto-pilot. Their bodies, their secrets, and their truths have been hidden for too long. With every whispered confession and stolen touch, they begin to rebuild themselves, piece by piece.

But someone is always watching.

The husbands, distracted and distant, begin to sense something shifting. Some grow suspicious. Others intrigued. And one — Gloria’s own son — watches with obsessive hunger, recording what he shouldn't, until he's pulled into a game he doesn't understand.

In the glow of suburban streetlights, under the weight of years of silence, the women of Maple Lane are choosing each other. And no one—not their men, their children, or their pasts—can stop them now.

The House Across the Lane

The moon hung low and copper-toned over the cabin, casting long shadows across the floor where Claire sat hunched over Evelyn's tapes, a blanket draped over her shoulders like armor. She hadn't slept in thirty hours. Her eyes were dry, her breath shallow. One hand clutched a half-empty glass of whiskey, the other held a tape labeled INITIATION - MARGOT.

Nina sat across the room, curled on the couch, her knees pulled to her chest. She watched Claire — not as a lover, but as someone watching someone else teeter on the edge of a cliff they couldn't follow them down from.

"You need to stop," Nina whispered.

Claire didn't look up. "Stopping means forgiving."

"Forgiving who? Yourself? Veronica? Evelyn?"

Claire finally turned, eyes tired. "All of it."

Nina walked over, gently pried the tape from her hand, and knelt down in front of her. "If you keep digging into this, you won't find clarity, Claire. You'll find rot. And you'll think you deserve it."

Nina pressed her forehead to Claire's. "Not from me."

Outside, the crunch of leaves betrayed the silent presence of someone approaching.

She stood just beyond the porch, her hands empty, her hair wet from the fog. Her lips were chapped. Her heels clicked once against the wooden steps before she stopped herself — as if even her footsteps knew they no longer had permission to echo here.

Inside, Margot was the first to notice. She rose from her seat near the fireplace and opened the door.

The two women stared at each other.

Margot tilted her head. "You followed us."

"Why?" Gloria's voice rang out behind her. "To kill what's left?"

Veronica looked exhausted. "No. I came to tell her the truth."

Claire appeared in the doorway, her robe loose, her collarbone glistening with sweat.

Veronica's eyes found hers — and something broke there. Not just the slick manipulation Claire had always seen in her… but the pain beneath it. The vulnerability that had been carved out and filled with poison long ago.

"I was supposed to break you," Veronica said. "But I didn't. You broke me."

Claire stepped forward. "You lied. You used me."

"Yes," Veronica whispered. "But I didn't fake what I felt. Not all of it. Not the way I touched you. Not the way I looked at you when you fell asleep."

Margot scoffed. "You loved her in Evelyn's shadow. That's not love. That's training."

Veronica's gaze snapped to her. "You don't get to decide what it was. I survived Evelyn. The only way I could."

Claire folded her arms. "And now you want absolution?"

"No," Veronica said, voice cracking. "I want permission to burn it all down."

She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a tiny flash drive.

"Every backup Evelyn made of those tapes. I stole them."

Nina stepped forward. "You're lying."

Veronica shook her head. "Not this time. I want her to fall. I want her to choke on every secret she buried beneath women like us."

Claire took the flash drive slowly. "Why now?"

Veronica's eyes glistened. "Because when you left, you didn't just walk out of my bed. You walked out of the script Evelyn wrote for us all."

She didn't ask to stay.She didn't ask to be touched.She simply left.

Claire lay beside Nina, her face buried against Nina's shoulder. The heat between them had returned, but this time it was grief-forged — not lust.

Nina held her tightly. "We're not done."

Claire exhaled. "That's enough for now."

Evelyn stared at her phone. The backup system at her server farm had gone offline. All remote storage corrupted. Tampered.

And just below the blinking warning light was a name:

She smiled faintly, then calmly removed her gloves.

Inside: a vial of red liquid. Unlabeled.

She picked it up, watched it catch the light, and whispered to herself:

"Let's see what breaks next."

The Break Between Us