Back Burner

She never stays anywhere longer than a season. He has never once asked anyone for anything.

Wren Castellano walked out of the most talked-about kitchen in Chicago in the middle of a Thursday service, and eleven thousand people watched her do it on their phones. Three weeks later her car dies at dawn on Main Street in Juniper Harbor, and the only light on in town is Bev's Diner.

Nate Daly has eaten breakfast at Bev's since he was nine. He fixes whatever breaks without being asked, writes in pencil in a notebook nobody has ever read, and has just found out that the town quietly carried him and his mother for thirty years. He means to pay every one of them back.

Then Bev's heart gives out in the middle of the breakfast rush, the diner's seventy-fifth summer becomes its last, and Wren is running the grill with an X on her calendar on Labor Day. One summer, she tells him. No promises. Nobody owes anybody anything.

But some debts are how people hold on to you. And in a town that has always known how to give, the hardest thing either of them will ever do is ask.

A slow-burn, small-town summer romance about pancakes, pride and the people who wait on the shore. Book Five of the Juniper Harbor series, and a story that stands on its own.