Archivist’s Dare

Siofra Lane has three rules for survival:
Clean hands. True records. No heroics.
As a contract archivist and single mum, she moves from one crumbling collection to the next, stabilising the past just long enough for someone else to cut the ribbon and take the photographs. This time she’s in charge of a historic Irish house-museum where the humidity is too high, the dehumidifiers snore like happy dogs, and the trustees are already whispering about selling “one good picture” to save the rest.
Her job is simple: keep the building from falling apart and design an access plan so the public can come back without the house swearing at them.
Enter Theo Blake, renovation lead and quiet door-whisperer. He knows every hinge and alarm zone in the west wing, and he has absolutely no interest in grand gestures. Theo is all about safety, receipts, and doing the work in pairs so no-one’s body is pushed past its limits. He offers coffee that “doesn’t break friendships,” calls the dehumidifiers his happy dogs, and looks at Siofra like competence is the sexiest thing he’s ever seen.
Together they triage damp, sticky doors, and a chaotic governance board while Siofra’s seven-year-old daughter Clodagh designs “cushion tickets” and bee-shaped staff badges to stop grown-ups shouting at books.
But when a heavily annotated, irreplaceable map quietly disappears “for valuation,” Siofra realises the real risk to the collection isn’t the rain—it’s the people trying to turn heritage into a quick win. With a major donor who prefers truth to spin and a board chair who’s always one step from suggesting a sale, she has to choose between keeping her head down… or staging a cozy, paper-trail “heist” that keeps the map—and the house’s story—exactly where they belong.
As Siofra and Theo build an exhibition called Bread, Not Frames—celebrating the ordinary hands that kept the house alive through lean years—their partnership deepens into something neither of them planned: a slow, steady romance built on lists, late-night label-writing, and the radical idea that competence is intimacy.
Archivist’s Dare is a warm, clever contemporary romance about single motherhood, public trust, and the quiet rebellion of people who choose stewardship over spectacle—and each other over heroics.