35 pgs.
Dr. Amelia Chen, a grief-stricken museum curator, finds herself drawn to the Lost & Found Repository, where unclaimed objects seem to hum with sorrow. While cataloging these forgotten belongings, she discovers a secret nocturnal community calling themselves the Menders – immigrants and outcasts who can absorb emotional trauma from objects, healing them at immense personal cost.
Each Mender’s ability reflects their own history: Rosa, an aging cleaner, carries the pain of lost children; Hassan, a refugee teacher, restores love stories scarred by violence; Lin, an undocumented mother, tends to children’s toys steeped in separation; and Samuel, a Native social worker, repairs the spiritual wounds of labor. Their leader, Vivian, tells Amelia that they don’t erase pain – they redistribute it, transforming despair into endurance.
When Amelia finds her late daughter’s shattered phone in the repository, she’s faced with the temptation to erase her grief entirely. A well-meaning psychologist, Dr. Webb, offers institutional backing to “study” and “safely” replicate the Menders’ powers – but his proposal threatens to turn their sacred practice into a commodified medical technology.
Torn between scientific logic and human compassion, Amelia chooses to protect the Menders’ autonomy, even knowing it may kill them. She learns their central truth: healing doesn’t mean eliminating pain – it means carrying it together. By performing her own act of mending with her grandmother’s wedding ring, Amelia discovers that grief and love are inseparable; both give shape to what it means to be human.
Blending urban mysticism, cultural trauma, and ethical ambiguity, The Kintsugi Heart explores how empathy can both heal and destroy, and how every act of restoration leaves visible seams—gold lines that mark the cost of compassion.
FIRST PAGE EXCERPT
“Dr. Amelia Chen moved through the Central Transit Lost &
Found Repository like a woman cataloging the end of the
world. At fifty-one, she had spent her career documenting
other people’s abandoned things, but since Anna’s death eight
months ago, the work had become something else entirely—a
desperate attempt to prove that careful documentation could
prevent loss. If she could describe every scratch, every stain,
every faded thread with sufficient precision, maybe she could
hold back the chaos that had claimed her sixteen-year-old
daughter.
The warehouse stretched before her in neat, numbered aisles:
unclaimed luggage, forgotten electronics, the small
heartbreaking objects that marked interrupted journeys. Each
item told a story of disruption—a business trip cut short, a
family vacation that ended in argument, a child’s toy forgotten
in the rush to catch a connecting flight. Amelia had learned to
read these stories in the wear patterns of fabric, the scratches
on metal, the way certain objects seemed to radiate an
inexplicable sadness.
Her methodology had become obsessive since Anna’s death.
Where once she might have spent twenty minutes cataloging
an item, she now devoted hours to each object, photographing
it from dozens of angles, measuring every dimension to the
millimeter, writing descriptions that ran to multiple pages. Her
supervisor had expressed concern about her productivity, but
Amelia couldn’t explain that each act of documentation felt like
a prayer, a ritual that might somehow retroactively protect what
had already been lost.
The museum where she worked as chief curator had become
a refuge of sorts, its climate-controlled galleries filled with
artifacts from cultures that had survived wars, migrations, and
the collapse of civilizations. She found comfort in the
permanence of these objects, the way they had endured…”