The Secret Beneath Her Heart

Emmett Jimenez signed away a hundred and eighty thousand dollars and the venue that would have made him, and it still was not enough, because the thing he wanted back could not be bought and had already packed a bag. He cheated. His wife found it out the way a person finds rot in good fruit, from the inside, without being told, and she went home to her orchard and her sixty-two-year-old mother tree and closed the gate on him.

This is his story, told from inside the man who did the damage. Matilda Trujillo grafts peaches for a living, two cut things bound at a wound so they take as one tree or die at the union, and she has decided their marriage is a graft that did not take. She will not be argued with and she will not be paid off. She gives him work instead, on her terms, in her rows, and Emmett takes it, because standing near her while she wants him gone is still nearer than the empty house.

What Emmett cannot see, because he only ever sees her from the outside, is why she has stopped climbing her own ladder and started sending her sister up. He reads it as grief, then as a rival, then as illness, and he is wrong every time, and the truth of it is the one thing that would change everything and the one thing no one will say to him.

To earn a single honest season he gives up the money, the note her family holds over her land, the truck, the last of his pride, and asks for nothing, not even after he learns what she has been carrying. Some men buy their way back. This one has to be grafted back, slowly, at the wound, and wait a whole season to learn whether he takes.

A full-length, standalone marriage-in-trouble second-chance romance with a secret baby, told entirely from the grovelling husband's point of view, and a heroine who never once loses her feet.