She came to sell everything her grandmother left behind. She stayed because she couldn't help it.
Wren Welch has spent fifteen years perfecting a life away from Fox Cove - a glass studio in Asheville, work she can lose herself in, and the careful distance she's kept from the mountain town where she spent every summer as a child. Then her grandmother Rebecca dies, and the river cottage Wren grew up loving is suddenly hers. On one condition: she has to live in it for a year before she can sell it, rent it, or walk away.
She plans to endure the year. What she doesn't plan on is Jesse Bailey - the fly fishing guide next door, the man who found Rebecca after her death, the neighbor her grandmother trusted with a letter Wren doesn't discover until October.
Jesse has been carrying Rebecca's request through every quiet morning at the dock, every stack of firewood he's split without being asked. He was told to tell Wren something when she was ready to hear it. He wasn't told to fall in love with her along the way.
As late summer turns to fall in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the community of Fox Cove - Cherokee neighbors, artisan potters and glassblowers, the woman who runs the diner and the pastor who read Rebecca's will - reaches out to bring Wren home, she has to decide whether the year she agreed to endure is actually the year she was meant to begin.
The Borrowed Year is a tender, literary contemporary romance for readers of Carley Fortune, Emily Henry, and Beatriz Williams - a slow-burn story of grief, belonging, and the kind of love that arrives quietly and refuses to leave.
About the Fox Cove Series
Five interconnected standalone novels set in a small mountain town in Western North Carolina. Each book follows a different couple; each is a complete standalone with a full Happily Ever After. Book 2 of 5 arrives July 16.
Available in Kindle Unlimited.
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