By Rail under Starry Nights: Book 1 of the Cate Lockhart Series

After her mother’s sudden death and the collapse of a controlling marriage, twenty-seven-year-old Cate Lockhart feels completely untethered from her own life. When she discovers a hidden box of decades-old train tickets, faded photographs, and passionate letters addressed to a man named Luc Corbett, she makes an impulsive decision.

She boards the Indian Pacific, retracing her mother’s rail journeys across Australia in search of the man who once held her heart.

What begins as a solitary search for answers soon becomes far more complicated when Cate unexpectedly reconnects with five men she hasn’t seen since high school — including Zac, whose quiet steadiness still stirs something deep inside her. As the train carries them through vast outback landscapes and star-drenched nights, grief, longing, and new emotional bonds intertwine, forcing Cate to confront the difference between surviving and truly living.

Atmospheric, emotionally immersive, and quietly cinematic, By Rail Under Starry Nights is a tender story about unfinished love stories, found family, and the healing power of movement.