The Better Part

The life you can win is not always the one you're called to.

Dr. Priya Menon is the best surgical resident Cedar Vale has ever seen, and she has just been handed the fellowship she spent her whole life earning. It is everything she said she wanted. So she cannot understand why, at the very top of the ladder, she has never felt less sure of anything.

Then she meets Dr. Micah Ford, the palliative-care physician the whole hospital quietly believes gave up. Where Priya fights, he waits. Where she sees a problem to be solved, he sees a person to be with. He walked away from surgery once, into the specialty everyone treats as a retreat, and he has made a strange, stubborn peace with wanting nothing for himself.

They could not disagree more. Then a patient neither of them can save the usual way throws them together, and forces the question Priya has spent a decade outrunning. Is a life something you achieve, or something you receive? And has she confused being good at medicine with being good at love?

The closer Priya gets to Micah, the more the trade she made to earn her success begins to ache, because loving him would mean admitting the prize was never the point.

The Better Part is the fourth novel in the Cedar Vale series: warm, tender, closed-door contemporary romance with real medical stakes and quiet, hard-won faith, for anyone who has ever wondered whether the life they built is the life they were meant for.

Happily ever after guaranteed.