After The Silence

She took six hundred dollars that wasn’t hers. He’s about to find out.Mara Ellison has spent eighteen months hiding exactly how close she is to losing everything. A rented room she’s behind on. A mountain of medical debt from her mother’s final year. A second job she tells almost no one about. When the numbers finally stop working, and an envelope of someone else’s cash is sitting right in front of her, she makes one quiet, desperate choice, and tells herself it’s only a loan.Nate Whitfield hasn’t let anyone all the way in since the accident that took his wife and changed the shape of his whole life. Between running his family’s hardware store from a wheelchair he refuses to let define him, and raising a sharp, blunt, entirely wonderful eight-year-old daughter alone, he has told himself, for three years, that this is simply what his life looks like now.Until Mara starts showing up. Until his daughter adores her. Until, for the first time since he buried his wife, he lets himself want something again.Then an old invoice surfaces the truth Mara has been hiding, and Nate has to decide whether one desperate mistake erases everything good that came after it. Mara has to learn that needing help was never the thing that made her unworthy of love. And both of them have to face the difference between the kind of silence that protects you, and the kind that slowly costs you everyone who was ever going to stay.A standalone, dual-POV small-town contemporary romance with a full emotional arc, a found family at its center, and a guaranteed happy ending. Set in the same town as Going Through It and Uncharted Hours, Books One and Two in The Ashford Stories, though each novel stands completely on its own.