Charlie Wickett is an engineer with a gift for fixing things that aren't supposed to work and a habit of putting the big feelings to music. She spent the 1980s in California: Caltech, then JPL, building a career in the stars alongside a sister who'd go to war for her. She lost people along the way. The ones who raised her when her parents couldn't. The ones who taught her that love was just showing up, every single day, until it became the architecture of a life.

On New Year's Day, 1990, Charlie vanishes from an empty JPL lab and materializes forty light-years from Earth, in the kitchen of an interspecies animal rescue vessel called the Emberkind. She is covered in pastry batter. She is wearing a Fleetwood Mac t-shirt. And she is surrounded by a crew of aliens she cannot name, on a ship she cannot explain, in a galaxy she has no map for.

The Emberkind rescues strays. It always has.

Its captain is a Kaelari woman named Reyna Solas: sage green skin, gold bioluminescent markings, and a composure so thorough it looks like it was built to withstand orbital reentry. Reyna runs her ship, tends her crew, and keeps everyone at a distance she has spent years perfecting. She has her reasons. They are not small.

Charlie has a Walkman, a bag of mixtapes, and the kind of stubbornness that makes her tell the captain, on her first day aboard, that the engines are running below capacity.

She is not wrong. About the engines.

Over six months of rescue missions, crew dinners, and 80s music filling corridors that have never heard a human voice, Charlie finds something on the Emberkind she stopped expecting: people who show up. A ship that hums when everyone is accounted for. A life that fits, even though nothing about it should.

And a captain who keeps not looking at her in ways that take up a lot of room.

Every Almost is an adult sapphic sci-fi slow-burn romance about music as a language, grief as a bridge, found family at forty light-years, and two women circling each other with the careful precision of people who know exactly what they stand to lose.

Guaranteed happily ever after.

Book One of the Emberkind Series.