The Debt That Bought Us

Tess Lindqvist has kept her mother's hardware store alive on stubbornness and a small business loan, and she is not selling. Then the mortgage gets called by a lender with a Russian name, and Tess drives to the office to yell at somebody — and ends up yelling at Kirill Agapov, who does not like yelling, does not like hardware stores, and has spent nine months quietly buying up her town's distressed debt. He makes her an offer. Marry him, keep the store, and the mortgage is a gift. She says no. Then the windows get broken, her dog goes missing for a day, and a stranger asks her about her father, who died in 2004 in a way nobody ever explained. She takes the deal. What Kirill actually wants isn't the town. It's the name of the man who killed his father in a Cleveland parking lot in 2003, and he thinks her father knew it. This is a marriage of convenience, grumpy-sunshine bratva thriller — the confession comes out of a receipt printer.