The Heart You Can't Have

Stories of Impossible Love

By: Maria Merlino

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

With illustrations This is not a book of tidy love stories.

In these ten stories, people fall in love with the wrong person, at the wrong time, or in a way that can never fully exist in the real world. A fire lookout lives for fifteen minutes of small talk with a woman who will never choose him. A poet becomes the pet project of a married woman who loves being his muse more than she ever loved him. A therapist quietly destroys a patient in the name of “helping.” A woman who cannot stay faithful keeps chasing the same high, breaking herself and others along the way. A father makes a bargain that gives him the life he always wanted at a cost he can never confess.

Some characters choose the hard thing and walk away. Some betray themselves and the people who love them. Some keep going long after they know the love they want is impossible. All of them live with the consequences.

These are intense, emotional, sometimes uncomfortable stories about desire, shame, boundaries, and the quiet ways people can break each other without ever raising their voices. The collection does not promise happy endings, but it does promise honest ones.

For readers who are tired of neat romances and want fiction that looks directly at obsession, longing, and the price of wanting what you cannot have, this book is an invitation to look at impossible love without flinching.

It will hurt. But it might also make you feel seen.