Paid In Full

Some debts can be paid in cash. The rest come due in public.

Mari Vega is twenty-four, five foot four, and a volunteer firefighter with a rule for everything, every one of them written in the notebook she has never once been without on a call. What she does not have is a rule for the night the township treasurer presses a single folded page into her hand and tells her to read it at a table, with a light.

It is a leaf from a ledger: thirty-eight thousand dollars in cash, drawn from the Juniper Harbor fire fund on the twenty-ninth of May, 1996, and never explained. The books for that whole decade have vanished. Then the State of Michigan sends a letter, and after the letter it sends Lieutenant Dana Reyes of Traverse City Fire: precise, gray-eyed, armed with a clipboard and a firm belief that everything is a finding.

Station 4 has run on trust for a hundred years, on casseroles and favors and who owes whom a ham. Mari knows exactly what an honest answer could cost the people she loves. She also knows that the woman who has come to count the town's debts is the first person who has ever looked at her and seen the whole notebook.

Some accounts are not meant to be closed in private. Some are the only ones worth settling. And in a town that has always known better than to ask, the bravest thing to do may be to open the books.

A slow-burn, small-town romance about duty, debt and the people who hold the other end of the rope. Book Four of the Juniper Harbor series, and a story that stands on its own.