The Last Platform

Some prices you pay in money. This one, Cora Pell will pay in the only currency she has left—her heart.

November, 1947. The war is over, but the country is still learning how to live in the quiet. Cora boards a westbound train out of a Pennsylvania mill town carrying a taped cardboard case, four dollars she can't spare, and a dead man's ring sewn into the seam of her glove. Waiting at the end of the line is Walter Holt—a good man, a steady man, the brother of the sweetheart the war took from her. She has given him her word. She means to keep it. She means to cross a four-day country without crying once.

Then the railroad, in its enormous indifference, seats her across the aisle from Gabriel Marsh.

He's a discharged sergeant coming home to nothing but the harmonica of a boy he couldn't save, a bad hip that argues with every step, and a face with nothing soft left anywhere on it. Over shared suppers on white linen, over stranded nights of steam and snow and blackout dark, over letters slipped beneath a boarding-house door, two people who have carefully buried their hearts begin—against every promise, against all good sense—to feel them beat again.

But Cora is spoken for. Gabe has nothing in his empty soldier's hands to offer her. And the last platform is coming fast, closer with every mile, every snowfall, every stolen hour they were never meant to share.

The Last Platform is a sweeping, slow-burn historical romance written in prose as spare and aching as a train whistle in the cold—a story of duty and loss, of the small kindnesses done sideways or not at all, and of the terrible courage it takes to choose love when love costs everything you own.

Some hearts, once they start beating again, will not be told to stop.