A Bride for the Bitter Season

The Lark family built Sable Falls, and Perpetua Lark is the last of them. When three million dollars goes missing from the mill's pension fund, the town's two remaining powers make a treaty: the Ashen Grounds MC will swallow the loss, and Pia will marry the club's new president. Isaiah Mott is forty-four, unhurried and cold on the surface, and he wants this arrangement exactly as much as she does — which is to say not at all. They marry in a church with seven witnesses and a bad furnace. By April they are no longer pretending. By June she is carrying his child. By July the missing money has a name on it, and the name is hers — forged, but hers — and the only way to clear her family is to disappear before the baby is born. She leaves a letter on a kitchen table. She comes back two winters later with a daughter, evidence, and the courage to ask a man who has been standing still for two years to move.