All the Way Through Winter

Marlowe Ferris arrives in Quillen Harbor, Maine, with a rented room, a folding rule, and a name she can no longer say out loud in her own industry.At forty-one she was the best event architect in New York, until she did the correct thing instead of the right one and a nineteen-year-old paid for it. Now she has one job left on her books, a January wedding she owes a friend, and four months in a boatyard apartment above a man who does not ask questions.Ansel Bray has been counting days for three years. He builds boats, raises his fifteen-year-old daughter, and does not talk in rooms. When the town votes in December on whether to sell the waterfront out from under his grandfather's lease, everyone assumes he will say nothing, because he never does.What starts as a sublet becomes a bench they share. Then a radio left on so neither of them has to speak. Then a winter neither of them planned for.But the woman who ended Marlowe's career has come to Quillen Harbor to hire her back, and the only way to save the harbor is for Marlowe to stand up in a full gymnasium and let herself be seen.A slow-burn, closed-door contemporary romance about second chances after forty, small-town winters, and what it costs to stop being careful.