In a world where the crowd never stops watching, two strangers navigate the heat of public gaze and the private cost of survival. August Roux, once the brightest star in European football, sees his career hanging by a thread after an on-pitch confrontation goes viral. Every move he makes now is caught between redemption and self-destruction. June Maseko, a Johannesburg-born painter breaking into Chicago’s art world, builds her reputation brushstroke by brushstroke—while keeping the wildfire of her past under glass. Across cities and continents, their stories echo: ambition laced with memory, fame shadowed by loss, desire tempered by the fear of burning again. As both face choices that could remake—or erase—the lives they’ve fought for, the heat between them becomes impossible to ignore. Told in two magnetic voices, this is a novel about identity, reinvention, and what remains after the fire.