OUT OF OFFICE

Phoebe Strand has spent eight months conducting a polite but pointed email war with someone in marketing she’s never met. The arguments are technically courteous, specifically reasoned, and considerably more interesting than any professional correspondence has a right to be. She reviewed the retreat roster on the drive to Vermont and confirmed that G. Wicker was not among the twelve attendees. The roster was current as of 3pm Friday.

It is now Sunday and G. Wicker is checking in at the desk twelve feet from where she is standing.

Before Phoebe can process what “Griffin” means in a practical sense — there’s a water main break that takes out four guest rooms and leaves one remaining double, a retreat facilitator who describes this as “wonderful for connection” and means it, a Professional Relationship Inventory worksheet they have to complete together about their working relationship that neither of them can answer honestly in public, a ropes course where they are assigned as belay partners and the belay relationship requires complete physical trust, a campfire where they both tell the story of the same eight-month email correspondence from opposite sides without naming each other, and conversations in the dark after midnight when the professional performance has been running too long to maintain.

She’s spent eight months being right about the emails and has been carefully avoiding the question of why she found being right so interesting. He’s spent eight months treating their correspondence as the most engaging professional challenge he’s had in years and has been calling this “a useful working dynamic” for long enough that he’s stopped examining the phrase.

A five-day Vermont wellness retreat with mandatory trust exercises is about to make distance very difficult for both of them.

Enemies-to-lovers slow burn where the grand gesture is an email — subject line: Re: Professional Relationship Inventory (Revised) — and the third sentence is not about work. The kind of book that makes you want to open a pointed email thread and finally say what you meant.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Romance > Romantic Comedy sits at 8.7 sales-to-comp (Hot Mainstream) with ~120 daily sales per top-20 title — enemies-to-lovers is the #1 reader preference trope; workplace rivals context stacks directly on top

→ Dual-category play with Romance > Workplace (10.1 sales-to-comp, Hot Niche) — legitimate positioning in two high-volume categories, peer dynamic avoids power-imbalance concerns

→ The identity reveal mechanic is a fresh differentiator — eight months of emails, no photos, first meeting at check-in; no current Top 100 title uses this in a corporate retreat setting

→ “The roster was updated on Friday” is a one-sentence premise — instantly legible, inherently funny, built for BookTok sharing

→ May/June launch targets peak summer out-of-office demand — title resonance + Vermont setting captures the seasonal window with no direct competitor in the corporate retreat niche

→ 3-book Inn at Maple Ridge series with ensemble seeded in Book 1 — Harlan, Lynette, and two future protagonists established; readthrough built in

TROPES:
• Enemies-to-Lovers
• Forced Proximity
• Workplace Rivals (Peer Dynamic)
• Slow Burn • Stuck Together
• Identity Reveal
• One Room
• Grumpy/Sunshine

HEAT LEVEL: Moderate / Closed Door

Perfect for fans of: Christina Lauren, Emily Henry, Elizabeth O’Roark, and Sally Thorne