Second Touch

For three years, Marina Cerqueira has built a life no one can touch. The Lisbon pianist abandoned performance after Tomás died; a single chord could make every remembered pressure collapse into the present.

Then, at a winter dinner, her fingers brush those of Alex Navarro, a visiting guitarist. Their first contact is mercifully clean. The second is not. Alex's callused warmth arrives together with the exact sensation of Tomás's hand, and Marina discovers a private law: each repeated touch summons earlier ones, while every new intimacy adds another voice to the body's score.

Alex offers laughter, music, and the dangerous possibility of desire. But the more Marina wants him, the more physically present the dead become. To protect herself, she can retreat into a life of gloves and untouched keys. To stay, she must risk a love in which no hand ever arrives alone.

Second Touch is a sensuous, piercing novel about grief stored in the nervous system, the fidelity owed to memory, and what it costs to let the present touch a body already full of history.

Every new hand enters a history already in progress.