Still Beating

I came to Still Beating sideways. A friend who reads a lot of romance told me this one wrecked her, and she said it in the way people warn you about a dog that bites. I looked it up and saw the basics: first put out on her own in 2020, then reissued by Bloom Books, the paperback I read runs 448 pages with ISBN 9781728291475. Dark survival romance. Enemies who get taken. That premise sounded like it could go very wrong. I read it across a weekend in October, mostly late at night, and I kept having to put it down and walk around the kitchen. Not because it scared me exactly. Because it sits with two people in a terrible small room for a long time, and then it stays with them after, when the room is gone.

A quick caution before I get into the plot, since it matters for whether you should pick this up at all. This book centers on kidnapping, captivity, physical assault, and coerced intimacy. Hartmann keeps the worst moments off the page or renders them in broad terms rather than step by step detail, and I will do the same here. Still, the subject is heavy from the first basement chapter to the last third of recovery. If those topics are hard for you right now, skip this one. There are plenty of romances about hate turning to love that do not ask this much of the reader.

Cora Lawson is our narrator for much of the book, with Dean Asher carrying other chapters. Cora teaches, she jokes when she is nervous, and she has spent something like fifteen years locked in a prank war with Dean. He is her older sister Mandy's longtime boyfriend, later fiance, a guy Cora decided long ago was arrogant and careless with people. The teasing between them started as family party stuff, stealing fries, mocking each other's dating lives, Christmas gifts meant to embarrass. Over time it hardened into something both of them reached for whenever the family got together. They would rather snipe at each other than sit with the awkward quiet.

I recognized that dynamic right away. Every family has a pair like that. It looks fun from the outside and feels a little mean up close, and nobody quite knows how to stop it because stopping would mean admitting it stopped being fun years ago.

Fifteen years of needling

The early chapters set up the triangle. Mandy is the responsible older sister, the one planning and hosting, the one who has been with Dean so long that everyone treats the wedding as a matter of scheduling. Cora loves her sister but feels smaller next to her. Mandy has the steady relationship, the house talk, the five year plan. Cora has a classroom she cares about, a small apartment, and a habit of dating people who do not stick.

Dean floats through these scenes with easy confidence. He works, he shows up, he charms Mandy's parents. With Cora he drops the charm. He calls her out for being judgmental. She calls him out for coasting on looks and jokes. At Mandy's thirtieth birthday party, which opens the book, they fall into the old rhythm in front of everyone. It gets laughs. It also leaves Cora feeling scraped raw in a way she covers by drinking too much.

What I liked here is that Hartmann does not make either of them secretly sweet from page one. Cora can be sharp in a way that crosses into unkind, especially about Dean's fidelity and ambition. Dean can be dismissive, the guy who answers a real question with a smirk. You can see why Mandy gets tired of refereeing. You can also see the small cracks. Dean remembers small things about Cora's teaching job. Cora notices when Dean looks worn out underneath the jokes. They would both deny it if asked.

One thing worth saying: Mandy never quite becomes a full person in this first stretch. She functions as the host, the planner, the reason Cora and Dean keep ending up in the same room. I wanted one scene of Mandy alone, competent at something she loves, so the later fallout would hurt more. We get hints, but mostly she exists in relation to the other two. That thinness caused problems for me later, and I will come back to it.

The party and the basement door

The turn comes fast. Cora's wallet goes missing at or after the party, which leaves her stuck and needing a ride. She ends up dependent on Dean, the last person she wants help from. They bicker in the car the way they always do. Then the night goes wrong in a way neither of them could have guessed.

They are taken by a man the press later calls the Matchmaker. In the book he is Earl, an ordinary seeming man with a fixed idea about lonely people and what they need. He chains Cora and Dean in his basement, separate shackles, one small space, concrete and cold. No phone. Little food. Rules that change when he feels like changing them.

Hartmann handles the abduction itself briefly, which I was grateful for. One page they are arguing about directions and old insults, the next Cora is waking up with her wrists raw and Dean's voice nearby telling her to breathe. The speed is the point. There is no clever escape window, no dropped gun, no speech where the villain explains everything. Just a locked door and a man who likes watching people depend on him.

The basement chapters are claustrophobic. Time blurs. Earl brings food when it suits him. He talks about love and pairing people up, as if he is doing them a favor. He punishes disobedience by withholding water or heat or sleep. Cora counts cracks in the wall. Dean talks to keep her awake, telling stories about jobs he hated and places he wanted to visit. They relieve themselves in a bucket. They get sick. Their bodies weaken. It is grim, and Hartmann does not pretty it up.

I want to be clear about how the book handles the sexual violence, since that is the reason many readers either seek this book out or avoid it. Earl assaults Cora repeatedly during the captivity, and he also forces contact between Cora and Dean for his own watching. The book states that these things happen without staging them as scenes to excite. The focus stays on what Cora shuts down in her mind in order to endure, and on Dean talking her through the after, telling her where to put her eyes, reminding her to eat. I am keeping my retelling at that level on purpose. The plot requires you to know it happened. It does not require detail, and detail would be wrong for this kind of summary.

Staying alive down there

The middle of the book is almost entirely the basement, and it works because the relationship shifts in small believable steps rather than one big reveal. At first Cora and Dean keep score even in chains. Who ate more. Who slept. Whose fault the wallet thing was. Then exhaustion strips that away. Dean, who Cora thought was soft, turns out to be steady in a crisis. He gives her his extra blanket scrap. He keeps track of Earl's patterns, when the footsteps come, which requests get punished and which get ignored. Cora, who Dean thought was fragile and dramatic, turns out to be stubborn in a way that keeps them both going. She refuses to stop talking. She makes Dean describe his ideal sandwich in absurd detail. She sings badly on purpose to make him laugh.

The phrase that gives the book its title shows up here. Dean puts his hand near her chest to feel her heart and tells her that as long as it keeps beating she is still here and still herself. It sounds corny out of context. Inside that basement, with both of them filthy and shaking, it reads as the only promise he can honestly make. He cannot promise rescue. He cannot promise Earl will leave them alone. He can promise to check that she is breathing and to say it out loud.

They develop systems. Tapping to signal awake or asleep. Saving crusts. Dean takes punishments meant for Cora when he can by drawing Earl's attention. There is a failed attempt to get out that costs them both, through weakness and bad timing rather than a twist. Afterward Earl tightens everything, and the chapters get shorter and harder to read.

This is also where the hate to love turn starts to feel earned rather than forced. It is not that they suddenly see each other's hotness under the dirt. It is that Dean sees Cora refuse to break in a way he admires, and Cora sees Dean stay gentle when he has every excuse to shut down. They start using first names softly instead of as weapons. They apologize for old stuff, a ruined Thanksgiving, a mean toast at an engagement dinner. The apologies are clumsy. One of them misremembers the year. That felt true to me. People in crisis do not deliver clean speeches.

If I have a complaint about this section, it is length. The basement goes on for a large share of the book, and around the two thirds mark of captivity I started skimming the routines. I understood why Hartmann kept them there so long. The bond has to feel forged, not declared. But three or four cycles of hunger and cold and Earl's visits would have done the work of six. A friend who read it agreed with me, though she said the repetition felt like the point, that time down there should drag. Fair. It still dragged for me.

Getting out is only half of it

They do get out. I am not spoiling much by saying so, since the book's second half is all over the back cover copy about being shackled long after the chains come off. Dean finds an opening during one of Earl's rituals and acts with a violence that shocks even him. He kills Earl. Then he half carries Cora out of that house to a road, to lights, to people calling numbers into radios.

The rescue chapters skip the movie version where everyone hugs in the hospital hallway. Cora drifts in and out. Dean gives statements with blood still under his nails. Mandy tries to smile, and the smile does not hold. Nurses ask questions with clipboards.

Then comes the part most captivity stories rush, and Hartmann slows down for it. Recovery does not go in a straight line. Cora cannot sleep in the dark or in silence. Certain smells send her back down the stairs. She flinches when touched without warning, including by people she loves. Dean drinks too much. He gets angry at small things, then goes numb. He replays moments where he thinks he should have acted sooner. They both get counseling, which the book treats as useful but not magic. Some sessions help. Some just tire them out.

They also cannot explain to anyone what happened between them down there without it sounding wrong. How do you tell your sister that you fell for her fiance while chained to a wall near him. How do you tell a detective that the man who shared your blanket is the only person who can calm you down. So they lie by omission for a while, which poisons everything. Cora pulls away from Mandy. Dean stays with Mandy out of guilt and history and because leaving right after a trauma feels cruel. Everyone is kind and everyone is miserable.

I found this aftermath more moving than the basement, which surprised me. There is a scene where Cora goes back to her classroom briefly and cannot handle the noise of chairs scraping. There is another where Dean fixes a cabinet hinge and has to sit down on the floor because his hands will not stop shaking.

Mandy and the impossible triangle

Sooner or later the triangle has to break, and Hartmann does not let anyone off easy. Mandy is not a villain. She is a woman whose sister and fiance went through something horrific that she was spared, and now they share a language she cannot speak. She tries. She brings food. She suggests trips. She asks Dean when things can go back to normal. Each question is reasonable. Each one lands like a stone because normal is gone.

The book reveals that Mandy and Dean were already strained before the abduction. Fifteen years together had settled into routine. There were gaps neither had addressed. That does not excuse what happens next, but it keeps the story from being a simple case of trauma stealing a good man from a good woman. Hartmann lets Mandy be selfish at times. She complains about the attention Cora gets. She pushes Dean for intimacy he cannot give yet. She says things about Cora's stability that are unfair. At the same time, the book lets Mandy be right to feel betrayed when the truth about Cora and Dean comes out. Both things can sit side by side.

Cora and Dean try to do the honorable thing and stay apart. It reads as sincere and hopeless. They check on each other through others. They run into each other at family events and stand too far apart on purpose. Dean ends the engagement, which hurts Mandy badly and makes him look terrible to half his circle. Cora tells herself the feelings were just fear glued to the nearest warm body. Nobody believes her, least of all her.

The resolution, when it comes, is quiet rather than grand. No airport chase, no wedding interruption. Dean moves, gets steadier, keeps showing up for counseling and for the unglamorous work of repair. Cora sets boundaries with her family, goes back to teaching in stages, learns to ask for what she needs in plain words. They choose each other late, after Mandy has had time to hear a real apology and after both of them can say what they want without using the basement as the only reason. Some readers will find this too tidy given the mess. I found it merciful. After what Hartmann put these two through, I did not want more punishment. I wanted proof they could live awake.

What worked and what wore me down

Let me put the praise and the gripes in one place, since I mixed them through the recap.

The bond between Cora and Dean is the reason to read. It builds through shared suffering without turning suffering into something pretty. Their banter early on is sharp enough to carry the slow pages, and their care later feels specific. He learns how she breathes when panic starts. She learns what steadies him when guilt spikes. Those details carry more weight than any speech about love surviving all.

Hartmann also writes the body well. Hunger, cold, thirst, the ache of lying on concrete, the weird alertness after too little sleep. You feel the basement in your teeth.

Now the hard parts. Mandy stays thin, as I said. For a book that asks us to care about a broken engagement, we spend too little time inside her head. A few late chapters try to fill the gap, but by then many readers have already decided she is cold or self centered. I think Hartmann wanted us to sit with that discomfort, to notice how fast we dismiss the person who was not in the basement. If so, I wish she had given Mandy one more chapter of ordinary life before everything broke, so the loss felt rounder.

The pacing sags twice, once deep in the basement and once in the long middle of recovery where Cora and Dean circle the same guilt for chapters. I get why both sags exist. Still, a shorter book would have hit harder. At 448 pages in this edition, there was room to cut twenty or thirty without losing anything that matters.

And readers should know the premise itself will not work for everyone. A romance that grows out of forced proximity under a violent captor raises real questions about choice and consent, and the book does not fully answer them. Hartmann has Cora and Dean name the worry themselves, which helps. They ask whether they would have chosen each other outside. The book's answer is yes, eventually, with time and distance to prove it. I bought it on the page. I also understand a reader who closes the book unconvinced. That doubt is built into the story, and I respect that Hartmann leaves some of it standing rather than arguing it away.

Would I hand this to a friend. Only a particular friend, one I know well, with the caution I opened with attached. If you like dark romance that takes trauma seriously, if you can handle captivity and assault as a subject, if you want the aftermath to get as much care as the escape, this one earns its reputation. Bring tea. Take breaks. Text someone after the basement chapters. I did.