The Way Back to You

Bridget Orrow builds bamboo fly rods the way her grandfather taught her, splitting the cane and planing it down until it tracks true, and she knows the one flaw you cannot plane out. A rod bent too hard for too long takes a set, a permanent memory of the bend, and after that it never casts straight again. Her marriage took a set the year they lost their son, and she has spent three years telling herself it cannot be driven out.

Kieran Fenbridge is the man who put the bend in it. He grieved their stillborn boy by disappearing into a business deal, leaned on the wrong person, and signed a lien against Bridget's grandfather's shop without telling her, and when she found the papers she took their daughter and left. Now the note is coming due, the only way to save the shop runs through him, and he is standing in her workroom every day, close enough to remember exactly how good they were before the world broke them.

Told in both their voices and in the present tense, so every glance and every mistake lands as it happens, this is the story of two people planing themselves back down to something true. The heat between them was never the problem, and it comes back first, honest and undeniable. The hard part is the truth Kieran is still hiding and the grief neither of them ever let the other see.

To earn his way home Kieran has to sell the things his pride was built on, tell the whole truth even when it costs him her, and finally stand at their son's grave beside her instead of running from it. Some couples break for good. These two have to drive the set out by hand, slowly, together, and find out whether a thing bent that far can ever track true again.

A full-length, standalone second-chance marriage romance in dual point of view and present tense, with a spicy, emotionally driven reunion, a hands-on heroine, and a hard-won happy ever after.