Ask Me at Bloom

Her husband woke up in the wrong year.

He remembers a heartbeat in a parking lot.

He doesn't remember burying their daughter.

Hazel Calder had one foot out of her marriage and a hearing set for April when the call came: Abel fell from a ladder, and fourteen months of his life are gone. The last thing he knows is a seventeen-week ultrasound. The first thing he asks, hand pressed to her flat stomach, is whether the baby is kicking yet.

So she tells him, gently, in order. Then he asks the question she can't answer yet. Why does she live in the honey house? What did he do?

Abel is not the man who stopped answering her. He asks before he touches a frame, a chair, her hand. He rebuilds what he thinks he broke, and it is the wrong thing. He keeps a promise he can't yet understand, and then breaks it in a kitchen at midnight, over a box the size of a loaf of bread.

Hazel wants the husband she married. She is not sure she can forgive the man he was. And somewhere on the ridge, a friend with a warm voice and a plate of lemon bars is making sure certain doors stay closed.

When the cold comes down on full bloom, it will take more than a bell to wake the valley. It will take both of them, and one hard answer.

Will she ask him to stay?

A dual-POV amnesia, second-chance, grief-and-forgiveness romance set among the orchards of eastern Washington. Standalone, no cliffhanger, happy ending. The husband earns his way back on the page. Three love scenes, closed-door.