Stay the Season

He has been in Fox Cove for two years, at her counter every morning for six months, saying almost nothing. On December 31st, he's leaving for good.

Sarah Reece has been carefully fine for two years two years since her father died at the Switchback Diner's counter on a Tuesday morning in October, two years since her marriage ended and she started raising eleven-year-old Lily on her own. She wears her father's apron every shift, keeps his stool empty at the counter, and has learned to want almost nothing beyond her daughter and the diner she inherited. That was easier when Marcus Hayes wasn't watching.

Marcus is the quiet Penbroke furniture maker Sarah worked beside at the diner the two weeks after Hurricane Helene an outsider who stayed on, who is African American and thirty-eight and at the end now of a two-year woodworking residency, with a Philadelphia gallery contract waiting on the second of January. He has been in love with her since the morning she came back to the counter wearing her father's apron. He's said nothing, because he's leaving. He's said nothing, because he was there the Tuesday morning her father died the one to find him, to call 911, to hold his hand until the paramedics came and he has never found the way to tell her.

Mid-December to New Year's Day. One Christmas Eve service. A snowstorm on the Old Bridge. A workshop at the edge of town where two people who have spent months in careful silence finally stop being careful. Sarah has to decide whether wanting something for herself is still allowed. Marcus has to decide whether the story he has been carrying belongs to her too - and whether Philadelphia was ever what he really wanted.

Grief had taught her that wanting things for herself was selfish. Marcus was learning that some silences can only be held so long.

Stay the Season is the second book in the Fox Cove series - a tender, slow-burn interracial Christmas romance about a single mother finding permission to want again, set in a fictional small mountain town in the western North Carolina Appalachians, from mid-December through the year's quiet turning into the new year.

For readers of Carley Fortune, Emily Henry, and Beatriz Williams.

Read free in Kindle Unlimited.