Why I Wrote What the Roses Hide

I have always loved stories about families—the things they tell one another, the things they do not, and the way choices made years before can quietly shape the next generation.

That was really where What the Roses Hide began.

I wanted to write a love story, but I knew from the beginning that I did not want it to belong to only one couple. I was much more interested in what happens after a love story—the families that are created, the hurts that are carried forward, and the secrets children sometimes inherit without ever knowing they exist.

Cassandra and Theodore came first. Their story became the beginning of something neither of them could possibly have understood at the time. Years later, Susanna and Thorne find themselves living with the consequences of choices that were made long before they were old enough to question them.

That idea fascinated me: How much of our lives is truly our own, and how much has been quietly shaped by the people who came before us?

I also wanted the setting to feel almost like another character. The houses, the land, the roses, the old chapel remains—they all carry pieces of the past. Victorian England gave me a world where family, reputation, duty, and love could collide in ways that felt both beautiful and heartbreaking.

More than anything, though, I wanted these characters to feel human. They love deeply. They make mistakes. Sometimes they stay silent when they should speak. Sometimes they hurt the people they are trying to protect. And sometimes they are given the chance to do differently than the generation before them.

That became the heart of What the Roses Hide for me.

It is a story about love, certainly. But it is also about family, forgiveness, loyalty, and the things we carry from one generation to the next.

And perhaps most of all, it is about the possibility that what has been broken for years does not always have to remain broken.

— Sushayla