Ash Over Cinders

Two years of ash. One cellar. A seed bank worth killing for. Hester Vane keeps the last stone-fruit stock in the Northwest alive in a root cellar under eleven feet of grey snow. The rules are simple: no strangers, no maps, no exceptions. Then Ivo Corrigan falls through the drift with a crate of seed potatoes and a mouth full of questions she can't afford to answer. She trains him to graft, weld, breathe through cloth. He trains her to trust exactly one person again. What she doesn't know is that someone else already sent him. When the crew from Government Camp comes down the ridge for the vault, Ivo has to choose between the deal that keeps him fed and the woman who taught him what a graft is for. He chooses wrong, then he chooses right, and both have a cost. A slow-burn post-apocalyptic survival romance for readers who want a love story built out of work, weather, and the last working hand pump on the mountain.