Angol
He's spent twenty-three years not letting himself want anything. She's the one thing he can't stop wanting.
Iris Hartley is the youngest of five, the loud one, the live wire - the Hartley nobody worries about. When the art teacher who first taught her to see the world dies, the grief cracks something open that Iris has spent her whole life talking over. She doesn't fall apart. Hartleys don't fall apart. They just leave the truck pointed at the road and handle it alone.
Cal Beckett has been the sheriff of Cedar Ridge, and the man who holds everyone else together, since he was nineteen. He raised his sister. He buried his parents. He keeps a drawer full of things he's made and never shown a soul. And he has spent years on the safe side of a line he drew himself - because Iris is his sister's best friend, eight years younger, and the last person a careful man should let himself love.
Then a storm, a stalled truck on the pass, and one true sentence neither of them can take back.
What starts as a secret kept for all the right reasons becomes the realest thing either of them has ever held - until the day Iris's grief reaches all the way down to the morning that broke her family, and she does the one thing she knows how to do with a good thing. She runs.
Things We Don't Say is a slow-burn, open-door small-town romance about grief and the people who sit down on the curb beside you, about the difference between being managed and being seen, and about two makers who finally learn to sign their names to the things they love. For readers who want their happy-ever-after earned the hard way.
