The Detour List

June Castellano can tell you exactly how long it takes to get anywhere. Six hours, eleven minutes from Chicago to the town she swore off at fifteen. She's a cartographer, and she trusts only one thing: the shortest line between two points. Grief, detours, and the ninety-second voicemail from her mother she's never played all live outside the model — filed away, drawer closed.

Then her estranged grandfather dies and blows the whole route apart.

Sully leaves her a radio shop she doesn't want, a locked wooden box she's forbidden to open until the very end, and a hand-numbered list of twelve pointless detours she has to drive across the country before any of it is hers. Straight in, straight out, seventy-two hours — that was the plan. The list wasn't in the plan. And neither was the co-driver.

Wes Hale is a scruffy traveling sound-recordist who knew Sully in a way June never got the chance to. He records grain elevators at dusk and hunts down diners with the wrong pie. He grieves her grandfather harder than she does — and he's hiding exactly why. Where June wants the fastest way through, Wes believes the detour is the whole point.

Over two thousand miles of breakdowns, bad motels, and one-star roadside attractions, two people who couldn't be more wrong for each other start to suspect the dead man routed them straight at each other on purpose. She counts the minutes. He wanders on purpose. And somewhere between a padlocked box and a voicemail she's afraid to hear, June discovers there's one road she was never taught to map — the one that asks her to stop running and stay.

Told in a warm, wry, ache-in-your-chest voice, The Detour List is a slow-burn cross-country romance about grief, second chances, and the people who reroute your entire life without asking.

Buckle up for the detour that changes everything.