I fell in love with a man who fixed things with his hands and looked at me like I was the only woman in every room. He was a handyman. I was a ballet dancer. We had nothing and it was everything.
Five years later, my husband is a household name. His face is on billboards. His name trends on Twitter. Women scream it in theaters. And I eat dinner alone in a house with five bedrooms and no one in them.
Then comes the anniversary he missed. The photos of him leaving a hotel with his gorgeous costar. The headlines that rearrange my marriage into a scandal I didn’t sign up for.
I pack one suitcase, drive four hours to my hometown, and start remembering who I was before I became someone’s wife.
But Jameson follows me.
He doesn’t beg. He doesn’t make promises he’ll break by Tuesday. He just shows up — fixing pipes at the local motel, buying the building that houses my ballet studio, standing in the rain with an umbrella that’s too small for him because he knows I hate driving in storms.
He’s becoming the man I married. The one I fell in love with before the fame ate him alive.
The problem is, I still love him. I never stopped. And the version of him standing in my small town with sawdust on his hands and nothing left to prove is the most dangerous version of all — because he’s the one I can’t resist.
But I’m not the woman who shrinks anymore. If he wants me back, he’ll have to earn it. Every single inch.
And I’m not making it easy.
A high-angst marriage-in-crisis romance with public humiliation, emotional betrayal, a wife who chooses herself, a husband who learns to grovel the hard way, and a hard-won happily ever after in a small town that takes no prisoners.
No cheating. No cliffhanger. Standalone.
