THE CAREFUL DISTANCE

He keeps everyone at arm's length. She gives herself away completely. And somewhere between a silent little girl and an unfinished boat, they find the distance closing.

Mac Doyle doesn't need another nanny. He needs a miracle. His eight-year-old daughter hasn't spoken a word in months — not since her grandfather died, not since her mother took a job three hundred miles away — and the small Maine boatyard that carries his family's name is one failed season from the bank's patience running out. When the latest nanny leaves a note on the coffee tin and disappears, Mac is out of options and out of time. Marion Ellery came to Cobb's Reach to disappear. A former pediatric speech therapist who poured herself out into hard cases until there was nothing left, she drove north after her mother's death to empty a house, sell it, and find out who she was when she wasn't being useful to anyone. She didn't plan to walk into a harbor town with a silent child in it. She didn't plan on Etta. What begins as a practical arrangement — a room off the kitchen, three simple rules, a boatbuilder and a burned-out therapist pretending they're just employer and employee — slowly becomes the one thing neither of them can afford. Mac has spent forty years standing in doorways, keeping the people he loves at a careful distance so losing them hurts less. Mare has spent her career pouring herself all the way in until there's nothing left. They are the same wound, bleeding in opposite directions. And Etta, who holds her grandfather's unfinished dinghy like a sleeping animal and hasn't spent a word on anyone since October, sees all of it — and begins, very quietly, to trust. The Careful Distance is a slow-burn, small-town romance set against the working harbors and fogbound mornings of coastal Maine, where a wooden boat due for the water on the sixteenth of August becomes a deadline for more than one kind of launch. Perfect for readers who love:

• Quiet, deeply emotional slow burns with real stakes
• Found family stories where the child is fully human, not a prop
• Grumpy-sunshine dynamics done with literary depth
• Grief handled honestly, without shortcuts
• Small-town settings that feel earned, not decorative

Content note: This novel contains themes of grief, parental loss, and a child's selective mutism. It includes open-door intimate scenes between the two adult leads. It ends with a full happily ever after.