Romance
ALMOST LOVE
A Romance Novel by L F Peterson
© Copyright 2025, L F Peterson
FOREWORD: ON PHOTOGRAPHING GHOSTS
All great love stories are haunted houses. L.F. Peterson’s Almost Love stands among them – – not as gothic romance, but as a forensic study of the specters we shelter in our ribs. Through Margaret Winters’ 20-year lens, we’re shown love’s most dangerous isotope: the kind that never decays because it never truly lived.
This is literature as emotional taxidermy – – the art of preserving what should have decomposed. Peterson stitches together the sinew of near-misses: hands almost held, confessions swallowed like struck matches, a lifetime spent curating absence. The genius lies in making us feel the weight of doors never opened, the gravitational pull of might-have-beens that warp entire decades.
Structural Brilliance
The novel’s twin pillars – – decaying architecture and undeveloped film – – form a symbiotic metaphor. Abandoned theaters become darkrooms where Margaret develops her longing: “I could develop ghosts in that light,” she remarks while photographing the Orpheum’s ruins. Each crumbling venue serves as a mausoleum for the self she might’ve been had she loved less cautiously.
Literary Kin
– The obsessive restraint of Kawabata’s Snow Country
– The spatial poetics of Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces (rooms as memory vessels)
– Joan Didion’s surgical precision applied to romantic pathology
Yet Peterson carves new territory. Each chapter a frame capturing some vital erosion:
“We don’t fall in love – – we’re conscripted. The heart makes soldiers of us all.”
This is more than a story about unrequited love. It’s about the stories we self-immolate to keep warm. The fairy tale of someday. The alibi of timing. The addiction to emotional chiaroscuro. The safer thrill of shadows over light
When Margaret finally attends Daniel’s coastal wedding, Peterson doesn’t give us catharsis but calcified clarity. The real tragedy isn’t losing him – – it’s realizing she’d built a religion around an empty altar. The ocean-side ceremony becomes her Rubicon: “Saltwater is just time liquefied. We drown in what we won’t let go.”
This novel deserves recognition for:
1. Psychological Verisimilitude – Makes Normal People read like melodrama.
2. Metaphoric Discipline – Every image services the central paradox: how we monumentize emotional absences.
3. Temporal Innovation – Flits between timelines like a darkroom timer, exposing how memory develops in chemical baths of regret.
Final Frame
Almost Love isn’t a warning about love’s risks, but an elegy for the greater crime: the lives we don’t live. Peterson constructs the masterpiece like Margaret composes photographs – – finding terrible beauty in abandonment’s afterimage, teaching us sometimes survival means developing our regrets to see what they really are: undeveloped futures.
PART I: THE ARCHITECTURE OF LONGING
CHAPTER ONE: Empty Rooms
Present Day
I have spent twenty years photographing empty rooms, and I am only now beginning to understand why.
The Orpheum Theater smells like velvet rot and forgotten dreams. I adjust my lens, capturing the way afternoon light slices through the broken ceiling, illuminating dust motes that dance like ghosts of audiences past. This is what I do – – I find beauty in abandonment, poetry in decay. I tell myself it’s art. My therapist says it’s avoidance.
“Margaret, you’re projecting onto buildings,” Dr. Reeves told me last month, her voice gentle but firm. “These spaces can’t hurt you. People can.”
I didn’t go back.
Now, standing in the orchestra pit of this dying theater, I frame the shot: rows of seats ascending into shadow, a stage where no one performs anymore. The perfect metaphor, though for what, I refuse to name. My finger hovers over the shutter button.
My phone buzzes. I ignore it. It buzzes again.
Probably my sister Claire, I think. She’s been relentless since I forgot her birthday dinner last week. Not forgot – – I remembered. I just couldn’t make myself show up, couldn’t make myself sit across from her and her husband and their easy, uncomplicated love. Couldn’t answer the question I saw in her eyes every time she looked at me: Why are you still alone?
The phone buzzes a third time.
I lower my camera with a sigh and pull out my phone. Not Claire.
A notification from a wedding website. Daniel Chen & Iris Nakamura invite you to celebrate their marriage…
The phone slips from my hand. It clatters against the concrete floor of the orchestra pit, the sound echoing through the empty theater like a gunshot. I don’t pick it up. I can’t. Because if I pick it up, I’ll have to read it again. And if I read it again, it becomes real.
Daniel is getting married.
Daniel is getting married to someone else.
I sink onto the dusty floor, my back against the wall, and for the first time in twenty years, I let myself cry in one of these empty rooms. The Orpheum Theater holds my grief the way it once held applause – – indifferently, temporarily, already forgetting.
Above me, through the hole in the ceiling, I watch clouds move across a pale October sky. I think about the last time I saw Daniel. Three months ago, coffee in Brooklyn, his treat. He’d been animated, happier than I’d seen him in years. He’d mentioned someone he was seeing. “It’s different this time, Maggie,” he’d said, using the nickname only he was allowed to use. “I think you’d really like her.”
I’d smiled. I’d said all the right things. I’d gone home and photographed an abandoned subway station until 3 AM, capturing the darkness.
My phone screen is still glowing on the floor beside me. I pick it up with shaking hands.
Daniel Chen & Iris Nakamura invite you to celebrate their marriage on November 14th in Ogunquit, Maine.
Six weeks away.
There’s a personal note attached: Maggie – – I know Maine in November is asking a lot, but I can’t imagine this day without you. You’re my oldest friend. My best friend. Please say you’ll come. Please say you’ll be happy for me. – – D
Please say you’ll be happy for me.
I read those six words over and over until they stop meaning anything.
The light has shifted. Golden hour – – the photographer’s magic time. I should be working. Instead, I’m sitting in the ruins of someone else’s dream, holding an invitation to watch the man I’ve loved for twenty years marry someone else.
I open my camera roll, scrolling back. Back past last week’s shoot at the abandoned hospital. Past last month’s series on foreclosed homes. Back and back and back, years of empty rooms and forgotten spaces, until I find it.
A photo from eight years ago. Daniel and me at his thirtieth birthday party. His arm around my shoulders, both of us laughing at something his friend Marcus said. But if you look closely – – and I have, hundreds of times – – you can see it in my eyes. The way I’m looking at him when he’s looking at the camera. The way I’ve always looked at him.
Like he’s the only person in the room. Like he’s the only person in the world.
I wonder if Iris looks at him like that. I wonder if he looks back.
My phone buzzes again. This time it is Claire.
Did you see? Daniel’s getting married! Finally! I’m so happy for him. Are you going? We should coordinate outfits. I’m thinking navy blue. Nothing too flashy – – we’re not trying to upstage the bride! Call me!
Three exclamation points. Claire’s happiness is always in multiples.
I don’t call her. Instead, I stand, brush the dust from my jeans, and pick up my camera. I have two more hours of good light, and I haven’t gotten the shot I came for.
I climb onto the stage, my footsteps echoing. From here, I can see the entire theater – – the peeling gilt, the water-stained ceiling, the seats that will never be filled again. I set up my tripod and adjust the settings for a long exposure.
Through the viewfinder, the Orpheum looks almost beautiful. Almost alive.
I think about Daniel’s wedding invitation sitting in my phone. I think about six weeks from now, watching him say vows to someone else. I think about twenty years of almosts and nearlys and not-quites.
I press the shutter button. The camera clicks, capturing everything and nothing at all.
CHAPTER TWO: The Blackout
Twenty Years Ago – – Freshman Year, Columbia University
The power went out during Introduction to Art History, which felt cosmically appropriate given that Professor Hendricks had been mid-sentence about Caravaggio’s use of chiaroscuro.
“Well,” she said into the sudden darkness, her voice dry with humor, “I suppose that’s one way to demonstrate the importance of light.”
Nervous laughter rippled through the lecture hall. I gathered my things quickly, grateful for the excuse to leave. It was only the third week of classes, and I was already overwhelmed – – by the city, by the noise, by the sheer number of people who all seemed to know exactly who they were and what they wanted.
I wasn’t one of them.
Outside, campus was chaos. Students poured from buildings, some annoyed, most excited by the disruption. It was 2:47 PM on a Tuesday in September, the air still summer-warm, and no one seemed to know what to do with unexpected freedom.
I did what I always did when overwhelmed: I walked.
Away from the crowds, away from the quad where someone had already started an impromptu party, away from my dorm where my roommate Shar would want to “make the most of it” by doing something social and terrifying.
I found myself at the edge of campus, near the old maintenance buildings that everyone said were condemned but never actually torn down. The kind of forgotten spaces that would later become my specialty, though I didn’t know that yet.
The door to one building was propped open with a brick.
I should have kept walking. Instead, I went inside.
The interior was cooler, dim even before the blackout. I could make out the shapes of old equipment, filing cabinets, the bones of the university’s infrastructure. Dust motes swam in the thin light from high windows. It smelled like motor oil and time.
“You’re not supposed to be in here.”
I jumped, my heart slamming against my ribs. A figure emerged from the shadows – – a guy, maybe my age, Asian, wearing a Columbia t-shirt and holding what looked like a very expensive camera.
“Neither are you,” I managed, once my heart rate normalized.
He grinned. “Fair point. I’m Daniel.”
“Margaret.”
“You running away from the blackout party too?”
“Is that what that was?”
“That’s what it’ll become. Give it twenty minutes and someone will have tapped a keg.” He moved closer, and I could see him better now – – tall, lean, with dark hair that fell into his eyes and an easy confidence I envied. “I came here to photograph the light. The way it comes through those windows up there? It’s perfect right now.”
I looked up. He was right. The late afternoon sun created geometric patterns on the concrete floor, sharp-edged and beautiful.
“Are you an art major?” I asked.
“Architecture. But I like to document buildings before they’re torn down. There’s something about capturing a space in its last days, you know? Like you’re preserving something that would otherwise be completely forgotten.”
I didn’t know it then, but that was the moment. Not love – – not yet. But recognition. The feeling of finding someone who saw the world the way I did.
“Can I see?” I asked, nodding at his camera.
He hesitated for only a second before handing it over. It was heavier than I expected, professional. I looked through the viewfinder at the images he’d captured – – empty hallways, broken windows, the play of light and shadow.
“These are beautiful,” I said, and meant it.
“Thanks. Most people think I’m weird for spending my free time in abandoned buildings.”
“I don’t think you’re weird.”
“Then you’re probably weird too.”
I laughed, surprising myself. I hadn’t laughed much since arriving at Columbia. “Probably.”
We spent the next two hours exploring that building together. Daniel showed me how to see light the way he did, how to find composition in chaos. I told him about growing up in Ohio, about feeling like I’d arrived at college without a map while everyone else had GPS.
“Everyone’s faking it,” he said. “The people who look like they have it together? They’re just better actors.”
“Are you faking it?”
He considered this. “Sometimes. But not right now.”
When the power came back on – – announced by the sudden hum of machinery and fluorescent lights flickering to life – – we both groaned.
“Back to reality,” Daniel said.
We exchanged numbers. “In case you want a guide to more condemned buildings,” he said. “I know all the best ones.”
“That’s a very specific offer.”
“You seem like someone who’d appreciate specificity.”
I did want a guide. I wanted to spend more time in the quiet spaces with this boy who understood that sometimes beauty lived in forgotten places.
I didn’t know then that I’d spend the next twenty years following him through empty rooms, always close, never quite close enough.
END OF SAMPLE