When the World Stopped Breathing
By Mary Wesley
Hardcover $19.99
Paperback $16.99
When COVID-19 descends upon Louisiana, Dr. Claire Rousseau, a seasoned nurse practitioner, finds herself leading a new ICU unit for critically ill patients. Her calm, capable exterior masks deep exhaustion and buried grief from years in acute care.
Two men complicate her already strained emotional landscape: Dr. Ethan Morales, a brilliant infectious disease specialist from New York who challenges her professionally and awakens something she thought she’d lost, and Jake Landry, her former love and trusted flight nurse, who offers her safety and understanding.
As the pandemic intensifies, Claire becomes the emotional center of a collapsing world — carrying others’ pain while questioning her own capacity to keep going. Through loss, love, and the act of bearing witness, she must decide what survival truly means — for her patients, her profession, and herself.