Worth Staying For

She empties the houses of the dead for a living. He spends his saving them. Now a stranger's will has locked them under the same leaking roof—and neither one is allowed to leave.

Greer Mercer prices other people's lives and walks away. Dishes, photographs, the pressed violet in a dead man's Bible—she catalogs it all, loads the truck, and never once looks in the mirror. She's built a whole careful existence out of being the one who leaves, because she learned young what happens to the ones who stay in the doorway watching taillights. So when a woman she can't remember wills her a crumbling Victorian in a fading Ozark springs town, Greer's plan is simple: appraise, list, sell, bank the money against the day she can finally own a door no one can make her walk out of.

There's just one catch. The house was left to two strangers at once—and Opaline Quist's will won't let either of them sell so much as a doorknob until they've lived in it together and restored it. Six months. February to August. Side by side with Ezra Barlow, a warm, maddening preservation carpenter who carries porch columns like people out of a fire and never sells a thing he loves.

They agree on nothing. But between a roof that won't hold, a reawakened spring threatening the foundation, a town that refuses to mind its own business, and a developer counting the days until they fail, Greer and Ezra begin to suspect the old woman knew exactly what she was doing. There are letters she left behind, doled out at particular moments. There are two names hidden in the staircase. And there's a secret that ties their whole lives together in ways neither of them saw coming.

Six months to finish the house, outlast the wrecking ball, and decide whether a real home is finally worth staying for.

One-click this slow-burn small-town romance today.