The Birchwall Series

“She came to make the workshop disappear. The storm had other plans.”

Blair Song flew into a snowbound Ohio town with a six-figure check and forty-eight hours to make a viral toy workshop disappear. Adam Kowalski takes eleven steps to turn raw oak into a toy a child keeps for thirty years, and he is not selling his grandfather’s name to anybody.

Then a billion-dollar app puts the workshop in an advertisement it had no right to use, a video of Adam refusing their money goes national inside a day, and the firm that caused it sends its very best fixer to make the whole thing quietly stop.

Blair has closed forty of these. She knows to the dollar what a family business is worth on the day it gives up, because she was nine years old the winter the pipes went in her mother’s basement shop, and she has spent every year since making sure she is never cold like that again. Forty-eight hours. One check. One signature. She has never lost a room she could buy her way out of — and she has never stood in one where nobody wanted anything.

Then the lake throws a level-three storm across the harbor road, and she is sealed into a freezing brick workshop with a man who grades timber the way she grades people, a backlog three thousand orders deep, and a treaty written on packing paper and taped above the stove. She came here to end this business. She is about to discover she is extraordinarily good at saving it — and that the only way to do it is to burn down every single thing she built to keep herself safe.

Alternating First Person • HEA

“Ten years of careful distance. One six-by-eight office. A single winter to prove it works.”

Phoebe Larsen has kept Danny Kowalski at exactly the same distance for ten years, because she learned before she could read that charm is weather — dazzling, and it moves on. Then the council funds a joint literacy programme, assigns the two of them one basement office six feet by eight, and gives them a single winter to prove it works.

Danny is the warmest thing in that town and has been since he was twelve years old, which is precisely how long it has been since anybody thought to ask him how he was.

Then a truck carrying the shop’s maple gets stuck in a freight yard outside Joliet, the lake throws a whiteout across the lakefront highway, and Phoebe finds herself snowbound a hundred miles from home with a man who cannot lift a storage tub and will not say so.

She has spent her whole life packing against a forecast. Nobody warned her what happens when the bright thing turns out to be the one who stays — and cannot, for the life of him, say the sentence that would let her.

Alternating First Person • HEA