Ask B.K. Borison about romance, and she’ll inevitably start talking about Baltimore. The Highlandtown native still recalls the first time her home city was portrayed the way she saw it, in Sleepless in Seattle, when the camera drifts past Fells Point, where Meg Ryan’s character lives.

“I was like, oh my God, it’s Baltimore,” says Borison. “It was the first time I saw the city I grew up in, romanticized.”

Baltimore can often be reduced to what people know from HBO’s The Wire—“which is a great show,” Borison is quick to affirm. But that’s not how she thinks of the city. Instead, she thinks about cobblestone streets, painted storefronts, the neighbors looping the block with their dogs every morning.

“I wanted First-Time Caller to feel like that,” says Borison, referencing her New York Times best-selling romance novel, the first installment of her three-part Heartstrings series, released last year by Berkley Romance, an imprint of Penguin Random House. She wants “people who are from the city to read the book and be like, that’s my city, that’s how I see it, that’s how I love it.”

Borison first started writing as an escape during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic after quitting her full-time job in marketing for the Ravens to move out West. It was a quiet companion during the long, isolating months as a first-time mother in California, away from her family.

“Writing has always been a place for me to be the best version of myself,” says Borison.

After self-publishing her debut novel, Lovelight Farms, in 2021, she caught the eye of her now-publisher. This took her small Amazon self-published book into the national spotlight, making her a household name in the romance genre.

Now back in her hometown, her ability to romanticize Baltimore comes naturally. After all, her own real-life love story is especially cinematic. It goes like this: Two strangers from two different schools, both from Maryland, both studying abroad in Rome, end up as next-door neighbors with overlooking balconies.

“To get my attention, he used to throw wine corks at my window,” says Borison.

Since married and now with full-time jobs and two kids, their spark is in the quiet, attentive moments that she mirrors in her books. In First-Time Caller, the protagonist’s ideal date is a picnic in Patterson Park. Of her day-to-day, she says, “I tend to romanticize the shit out of everything.”

The second book in her Heartstrings series comes out this month on Feb. 24. And Now, Back to You is about two competing Baltimore meteorologists in a classic opposites-attract love story, inspired by another Ephron film, When Harry Met Sally—proving that love stories are all about the right timing.

This, too, is much like Borison’s own life. “My mom says all the time that I had to go all the way across the world to find a guy in Maryland,” says Borison with a laugh.