A harbour-town radio host and her producer best friend fight to keep their love, their town, and their late-night show intact when a big-city network turns their friendship into a headline and their future into a test.
?Maeve Hart's voice belongs to the harbour. For years she has sat in a tiny studio above Brighton Cove, hosting Midnight Lines for the insomniacs, nurses on break and lonely hearts who call in from supermarket car parks and dark kitchens. The show is small, scrappy and fiercely loved - until a big-city network decides they want to put it on a bigger stage.
Crescent Audio promises everything Maeve has never allowed herself to want out loud: a wider audience, a polished co-production, a chance to make a living from the work that keeps her up at night. But the promotion comes with fine print. A glossy blog profile twists her words into a neat "small-town girl finally moving on" narrative. A new team starts asking how they can make her stories "more efficient." And somewhere in a meeting room she isn't invited to, someone decides her beloved harbour station is just a quaint origin story.
Standing in the control room beside her is Alex, the producer best friend whose fingerprints are on every episode she's ever made. He's finally pitched his own project - a documentary about the town and the people who live in its shadow - and for the first time his ambition matches the scale of his talent. When the network gently pushes him aside in favour of a "bigger name," their professional disappointment collides with the feelings he has kept buried for years.
The article that should have been Maeve's big break becomes a wedge between them. She sees Alex pulling away and fears she's proving every story about choosing career over love. He sees the network closing ranks and fears he's about to lose both his show and the only person who ever really saw him. Friendship, once their safest place, suddenly feels too tight and too fragile to hold everything they are both carrying.
On the hill above Brighton Cove, with the town on one side and the faint outline of the city on the other, Maeve and Alex have a choice: retreat back into the comfortable story they know, or risk everything on a new one. Together they will have to learn how to stand up to a network without burning every bridge, how to fight for their own names on their work, and how to love each other without turning their lives into a zero-sum game.
When Friendship Wasn't Enough Anymore is a tender, slow-burn friends-to-lovers romance about late-night radio, small-town loyalty and what happens when your world widens faster than your heart knows how to catch up. Perfect for readers who love harbour towns, complicated careers and love stories where the real drama happens in conversations on hillsides and quiet kitchens, long after the red "ON AIR" light has gone dark.
