The Last Wedding at Mercy Chapel

Seven weddings. One summer. One chapel Maggie Abbott fully intends to sell.

Maggie knows weddings.

She knows where the flowers should go, when the music should start, and exactly how long a best man can speak before somebody ought to confiscate the microphone.

What she no longer knows is whether any of the promises people make at the altar actually last.

Two years after her own engagement ended spectacularly badly, Maggie has built a successful life in Nashville planning other people's happily-ever-afters. She hasn't exactly stopped believing in God.

She has simply stopped expecting Him to answer.

Then her grandmother Ruth dies.

Maggie returns to Bellweather, Tennessee, expecting a funeral, a house full of memories, and enough paperwork to keep an attorney happy.

Instead, Ruth leaves her Mercy Chapel-a seventy-year-old white wedding chapel overlooking the river.

There is one aggravating condition in the will:

Seven weddings are already booked. Maggie has to see every one of them through before she can sell.

Apparently death has not stopped Ruth Abbott from meddling.

Neither has it prevented her from arranging for Sam Dillard to help keep the aging chapel standing.

Sam was Maggie's first love.

Now he is a carpenter, a widower, and the father of ten-year-old Lucy, who needs approximately forty-eight hours to decide Maggie belongs in Bellweather and considerably less time to begin interfering.

Maggie intends to survive the summer.

Honor Ruth's commitments.

Sell the chapel.

Return to Nashville.

Simple.

Then she finds the first letter.

Hidden beneath an old pew is something Ruth wrote in 1968 to a man Maggie has never heard of.

Then Maggie finds another.

And a photograph.

And pieces of a story her grandmother kept buried for more than fifty years.

Suddenly Mercy Chapel is no longer just an inconvenient inheritance.

As seven very different couples arrive carrying old grudges, impossible relatives, money problems, grief, broken families and second thoughts, Maggie keeps watching people do the one thing she has become very good at avoiding:

stay.

Meanwhile, a developer wants Mercy Chapel. Nashville is offering Maggie the kind of career opportunity she once would have accepted without hesitation. Sam refuses to ask her to give either one up for him.

And Ruth's letters are beginning to suggest that the chapel itself was born from a story about love, judgment, loss and mercy that Bellweather was never particularly eager to remember.

Maggie came home believing she had inherited a building.

She may have inherited a question instead.

What do you do when the life you planned is waiting in one direction-and everything you never expected to want is standing in the other?

The Last Wedding at Mercy Chapel is a warm, funny and deeply moving Christian romance about first love, complicated faith, family secrets, grief, forgiveness, seven unforgettable weddings-and the possibility that God can still be present even when you're not entirely sure what you believe anymore.

Sometimes coming home isn't the ending.

Sometimes it is where the story finally begins.