Why I gave grief a house full of secrets.. and a heroine whose story could still end in love.
I don’t know if you know… but a few years ago, I lost my husband. I was left all alone with a baby in my arms, and no one else around. So, I’ll do something I very rarely do, I’ll write this deeply personal post and send it out there, for those who are on the same boar as I was and am, so here goes:
When I write about widowhood, that fact is there before the first sentence. It is there before the romance, before the mystery, and before I decide whether a door should open by itself.
Widowhood can make you feel as though you’re losing your mind. The life you understood has changed, but you are still expected to inhabit it. The person you were, your whole identity, died along the person who was buried; and yet, you are still here. People ask how you are, and somehow you’re supposed to produce an answer that fits into a normal conversation. Meanwhile, “widow” has become a word that describes you. A word you never wanted and certainly didn’t volunteer for.
That is the personal starting point behind The Widow’s Curse. I wanted to write a Halloween romance in which the frightening things inside the house had competition from the frightening things inside a woman’s new reality.
Salome Believes Her Life Has Already Ended
When we meet Salome, she believes widowhood is her ending. Her husband is gone (I’ll add a trigger warning here: suicide is mentioned in the book, along with mental health matters), and the future she imagined with him has gone too. At Willow’s End, however, her story begins to move in a direction she could never have planned.
I wanted a heroine whose grief mattered throughout the book. It couldn’t simply be a tragic detail in her biography, mentioned once to explain why she was reluctant to date. Losing a husband changes the circumstances in which a new relationship might develop. Attraction arrives in a life that already contains love, memories, and loss.
Salome’s story gives those things room. She has sorrow to face, strength to discover, and questions that become harder to ignore as Halloween approaches. She also has a future, although believing in it is considerably more difficult than an encouraging quote on a cushion on his favorite armchair would suggest.
Then the House Starts Behaving Badly
There are flickering lights. Doors open on their own. Handprints appear on windows, apparently left by someone Salome cannot see.
This is where the mystery enters, and where I wanted the reader to share her uncertainty. Is her mind playing tricks on her? Is the house revealing something? Has she missed a detail that changes everything?
A haunted house is a useful setting for those questions because a home is supposed to be somewhere familiar and safe. When the lights flicker and the doors refuse to stay shut, even ordinary rooms become difficult to trust. Although, to be fair, a door opening by itself would first have me checking the latch. The supernatural can wait until we’ve ruled out poor maintenance.
For Salome, the disturbances bring her into contact with more than memories of her husband. They make her confront herself. The mystery gives her something to investigate while grief keeps asking questions that cannot be answered by finding a footprint.
Grief Doesn’t Follow Instructions
The book explores denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Those familiar terms offer ways to describe parts of Salome’s experience. They aren’t a timetable for how a bereaved person ought to feel.
Real grief does not reliably proceed through five stages in order. You don’t finish anger, receive a stamp, and move politely towards acceptance. I wanted to make that distinction here because a novel has a structure; a person’s loss does not have to obey one.
And a happy ending doesn’t make everything that came before it disappear. In this story, hope has to mean something a grieving woman might actually be able to reach for. It has to leave space for the love she has already known.
Why I Still Wanted to Write a Romance
I chose an enemies-to-lovers romance because I wanted Salome’s future to contain friction, desire, and the possibility of connection. She gets to be more than the woman something terrible happened to. She gets a mystery, a relationship, and decisions that belong to her.
New love cannot undo a death. But a romance can ask what becomes possible when a woman begins to imagine a life beyond the ending she thought was final.
That is what I want readers to find in The Widow’s Curse this Halloween: an unsettling house, a mystery that keeps them questioning, and a hard-earned happy ending. Find it through SoniaMRompoti.com, or get it on Amazon. You can also join my newsletter for more stories about complicated women finding love.
I gave Salome shadows to walk through. I also gave her somewhere to go.
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