The Next Chapter

A divorced English teacher and a widowed furniture maker, both starting over in a Vermont lake town. The hardest part of falling in love again isn't the falling — it's believing you're allowed to.

Claire Delaney is forty-two, newly divorced, and sitting in a circle of mismatched chairs on a Thursday evening in a church basement, trying to explain to a group of strangers why her twenty-year marriage ended. She is not ready for this. She is not ready for the lake town she moved to with her teenage daughter, or the teaching job she took because it was the only one available, or the quiet realization that the life she planned is over and the next one has not yet been written.

Theo Calloway is forty-five, a widowed furniture maker, and the man sitting three chairs away. He lost his wife to cancer eight years ago. He has a son. He has a workshop full of beautiful things he built with his hands. He has not let himself feel anything that could be taken away again — until a divorced English teacher walks into Thursday group and says something honest, and the honesty cracks something open in him that he thought he had sealed shut.

Three chairs apart. Thursday evenings. The slow, terrifying work of learning to want something again when wanting has burned you before.

"She squeezes back. Three houses apart. Two broken histories. Four children who are watching. I don't know what comes next. I don't need to. This is enough."

The Next Chapter is Book 1 in The Linden Street Letters, a five-book interconnected standalone series about a friend group of people over 35 who thought their love stories were over. Dual first-person POV. Medium heat. Guaranteed HEA. Children accounted for.

Divorce recovery. Widow romance. Single parents. Blended families. The kind of love that knows what it costs and chooses it anyway.

For fans of later-in-life second-chance romance, slow-burn dual-POV, and romances that make you feel seen at every age.

Free with this complete series.