Close Enough to Burn

Isadora Ivesgrave has spent ten years telling the holler a lie she never said out loud: that she is the reason Zachariah Quarbourne left. The truth is he drove out before her grandmother's kiln had even cooled, took an offshore welding berth, and left her nothing but a clay face he had pressed of her the night their whole lifelong friendship turned into something else. Now his welding-bed truck is grinding back up the mountain with a six-year-old girl on his hip, and the will that binds them is worse than any grief.

Ada left the homeplace, the pottery, and the old groundhog kiln to the two of them, fifty-fifty, and neither can sell or walk away until they rebuild the kiln together and fire one full season, spring to fall. If they fail, it all goes to the county and the bulldozers. So they dig clay from the same branch bank, stack the same wood, and stand a breath apart at the kiln mouth, and every day the thing that broke them ten years ago wakes back up, closer and hotter, close enough to burn.

Isadora makes face jugs, presses a face into wet clay and gives it to a thirty-hour fire that decides what survives and what cracks. She knows better than anyone that heat does not create what is true, it only reveals it. What the fire between them keeps revealing is that the wanting never died, and neither did the wound, and that Zachariah is still keeping one door open to run through.

To stay, he has to refuse the money and the easy exit, sever the old tie clean, put his own hands and his own savings into the arch he once walked away from, and stand at the fire for a whole burn without leaving. Some things bend in the heat and fail. Some come out of the burn harder and truer than they went in. Isadora has to decide which one they are, on her own terms, with everything she loves in the kiln at once.

A full-length, standalone second-chance romance with forced proximity, a friends-to-lovers slow burn, and a spicy, emotional reunion, told in dual point of view and present tense.