Second Edition

Name: Second Edition
Author: Tess Thompson

110 pages

Delphine Delacroix does not date.
Delphine Delacroix does not chat.
Delphine Delacroix especially has no interest in the quietly sunny bookstore owner everyone thinks is perfect for her.

Six years after losing her husband, Delphine has built a quiet life on control, routine, and careful distance. She runs her gallery by day. She raises her daughter. And in a small studio behind her cottage, she throws pots — slowly, patiently, for no one but herself — because clay is the only thing that’s ever let her make something whole out of something broken.
She politely, firmly, and with increasing exasperation, declines every matchmaking attempt the good people of Willet Cove have made on her behalf for the last three years.
Delphine is fine. Delphine is fine.
Then fifteen-year-old Annie makes the bravest choice of her young life: she walks into a grief support group alone. And Delphine — who has spent six years refusing that same room — is undone.
She’s not the only one who notices.
Dorian Flynn has always politely suggested that Delphine Delacroix might have opinions of her own about whom she dates. Then he sees a teenage girl sitting by herself in a room meant for grown-ups — and the fiercely guarded woman who comes to pick her up, clay still dried on her wrists — and realizes the entire town may have had a point all along.
Delphine is wary. Dorian is patient. And somehow, between hesitant conversations in quiet bookstore aisles, a watchful shop cat with opinions of his own, and a girl who deserves more than silence, an unlikely found family begins to form.
But letting someone in means risking the one thing Delphine has fought for six years to protect. And the longer she circles Dorian, the more she begins to suspect that the truth she’s been outrunning — about her husband, about herself, about what she’s really been afraid of — is finally ready to catch up with her.
She’s been wrong about the past.
She might be wrong about love, too.
Dorian is counting on it.

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