I Serve Somewhere.
He told her she'd find someone who wants this. She found somewhere instead.
In 2017, Vera runs the counter of a Palo Alto bakery and raises two daughters above the shop. On Wednesday nights she drives into the hills, where an old house keeps different hours, and serves there too. Nobody in one life knows the other exists.
I Serve Somewhere. is a novel of work, motherhood, inheritance, and chosen submission. Quiet prose. Explicit submission. Not a romance.
Releasing December 2, 2026
At quarter past five, six mornings a week, Vera unlocks a Palo Alto bakery and starts the ovens. At six-fifteen she carries a tray up thirteen steps to her sleeping daughters. At two she counts the drawer to the dollar. On Wednesday nights she drives into the hills, where an old house keeps different hours, and serves there too — under rules she keeps as exactly as she keeps the counter.
Then the baker's hands begin to fail, and his heart sets a deadline: the shop must change hands. His wife has watched Vera for nineteen years and is certain of what she's seen. She cannot see a future for Vera there. She is wrong about one thing only.
Vera doesn't fight. She bakes, she serves, she notices everything. And the year decides in her favor.
Vera never tells you what she feels. You will always know.
I Serve Somewhere. unfolds across a single year in Silicon Valley, between two places that were there before the Valley became the Valley: a third-generation bakery on a Palo Alto corner, and an old house in the hills that runs on protocol and inheritance. Vera serves both, on the same terms, with the same hands.
The intimacy in this book is service submission — rules, protocol, a collar that lives on a shelf between Wednesdays — and it is written in the same voice as the bread, the ledgers, and the daughters. The sex is characterization, held to the same instrument as everything else. It is explicit early and generously; then the year belongs mostly to bread, daughters, ledgers, and an inheritance nobody saw coming.
All intimacy depicted is consensual and explicit. The house runs on rules Vera chose and keeps by choice, and she is a submissive woman who is never powerless.
This is a complete, self-contained story. There is no love interest and no romance arc. Vera is not broken, and she is not rescued; no other book will finish this one for you. For readers who prefer implication to confession — this book trusts you to notice.
Intended for mature readers. Contains explicit sexual content.