The Unspoken Cord
Back in March 2020, I sat at my desk with a half-empty Diet Dr Pepper, the news looping quietly in the background, and the kind of world-ending dread you could feel in your bones. Remember that time? The air was thick with bleach and anxiety. Nobody knew what day it was. And everything I’d built—professionally, emotionally, spiritually—was unraveling at the seams.
So I did what I always do when the world feels unlivable.
I wrote.
That’s how The Unspoken Cord was born.
A Story That Hurt to Tell—and Refused to Stay Quiet
It started with a question I didn’t want to answer: What happens when the person you love disappears… but still breathes beside you?
That question became Evron. A poet. A partner. A man slowly losing the love of his life not to death, but to silence.
That silence became Luca. A jazz musician. A firecracker. A man struck by a stroke—and by secrets that refused to stay buried.
At first, it was a grief novel. A private one. The kind you write for yourself and promise never to share. But the characters didn’t stay quiet. They never do.
And somewhere along the way, this became more than a novel about loss.
It became a novel about truth.
The kind we bury. The kind we whisper. The kind that ruins us if we don’t say it out loud.
Writing Through the Grief—and Into the Rage
Evron starts as a caregiver, but what he becomes is far more complicated. What happens when caregiving curdles into resentment? When love is still there but has nowhere to go? When loyalty becomes a trap?
I didn’t want to write the sanitized, noble version of grief.
I wanted to write about the rage. The exhaustion. The ugly parts of loving someone through illness and realizing you’re starting to vanish in the process. The story isn’t about healing. It’s about surviving what healing never comes.
And then there’s the betrayal. Because The Unspoken Cord is also about secrets—and how devastating it is to learn that the person you gave everything to… kept part of themselves from you. Even as you wipe their mouth. Even as you sell pieces of your life to keep them breathing.
“I don’t think people understand what it means to stay.
To watch someone disappear by inches while they’re still breathing next to you.
To be loyal to the version of them that no longer shows up.
To love in past tense while speaking in present.”
A Pandemic Novel… That’s Not About the Pandemic
Let me be clear—this book isn’t about COVID. It’s not a quarantine love story or a diary of sourdough trauma. But it was written in the same grief-soaked silence that so many of us lived through. The same uncertainty. The same loneliness. The same impulse to cling to connection even when it was falling apart in our hands.
And when I came back to it this year—editing it for release—I didn’t expect to feel what I did.
But I fell in love with Evron and Luca all over again.
Not because they’re perfect. They’re not. Not even close.
But because they’re real. Because they’re raw. Because they remind me what queer love looks like when the filters are off. When the kitchen smells like antiseptic instead of pasta. When intimacy is a feeding tube. When the only person who touches you back is someone new. Someone who doesn’t know what you’ve already lost.
“I didn’t know which hurt worse—losing him slowly, or realizing I’d already been gone for months.”
Why This Book Matters to Me
I’ve written a lot of stories. Some personal. Some political. Some loud and defiant.
But The Unspoken Cord feels different. It feels like I finally let myself write the messy, unfiltered, impossible parts of queer love—the ones we don’t put in movies. The ones where no one’s the villain, but someone still ends up bleeding.
This isn’t a “representational” story. It’s a truthful one.
I wrote it for the people who stay.
For the people who leave and can’t explain why.
For the queer people who’ve been told their stories are too complicated to sell.
For the caregivers who want to scream into the void.
For the ones who’ve ever whispered, “I love you, but I don’t know who you are anymore.”
“I kissed a man who didn’t remember me, and still—some part of me hoped he’d come back through my mouth.”
I’m proud of this one.
I love it with my whole battered, beat-up heart.
And I hope—if you read it—it finds the broken, breathless, beautiful part of you that needed to be seen.
Because sometimes survival is the story.
Always.
—Bee.