And if yearning had a shape, it would look an awful lot like me. ▍ AN ORIGINAL STORY ╱ small town romance! Graceland, Georgia. A town where spotted cattle graze and home is always for certain. Where the girl crowned homecoming queen bleeds for the boy with old money veins and wandering eyes. That girl blossoms like she's expected to, bleeding heart and all, just to wither beneath the man oozing green and gold. It's too late to go back, but it's never too late to try again. Junia ( June ) Driscoll was homegrown royalty. Her small town notoriety was meant to carve out a pathway to her undoubted success. Her husband, her high school sweetheart, a star athlete, and successful investment banker, had given the girl all she could have imagined. However, the dream had since become a total nightmare. All that is shadowed is brought to light when she agrees to star in a segment disguised as a Mother's Day tribute on a popular talk program, in which her closest friend confesses to having an affair with her husband. Heart corrupted, she chooses not to be left alone in spite of herself. With her small daughter, Pearl, in tow, she forges a route back to the place where everything is comforted by love and lillies. There, she hopes to mend the pieces of her broken heart. Bit by nauseating bit. What she hadn't anticipated was to reconcile with an old friend turned brief flame clad in consolation whose heart had nearly bled him dry. Their shared gloom soon begins to fade, playing host to luminescence. And in that glimmer of light, of what was then, what was now, and of what was to come-that, was where eternity began to flow. ❪ f!oc & m!oc ❫ PEARLJARS © 2024 BOOK ONE of FOUR written by april COVER by the amazing @aastratta ❤︎

My lovely little dove, please don't leave. Whatever you want you can have here, too-with me-we can share it. You're always leaving. Please stop leaving, it kills me every time. ▍ AN ORIGINAL ╱ small town romance! ❪ f!oc & m!oc ❫ PEARLJARS © 2024 BOOK FOUR of FOUR written by april COVER by the amazing @aastratta ❤︎

If I have to suffer, it may as well be at your hands. Your pretty hands. ▍ AN ORIGINAL ╱ small town romance! In Graceland, strength looks like keeping your head down and your heart walled off. Sawyer Driscoll knows this well. As a young father, small-town lawyer, and volunteer firefighter, he's the one people rely on. The one who never falls apart. But after the death of his grandfather, the man who helped raise him and taught him how to be steady, something in Sawyer began to quietly rot. He doesn't speak of the migraines that creep in like storm fronts or the way loss has hollowed out more than just his home. He doesn't ask for help. Not until Calla Amos steps in. Calla has always been the kind of woman who stays-the kind who tends to the wounds no one else will look at. But even healers have their breaking points. After leaving her nursing job just a few miles out of town, she's returned to Graceland with quieter eyes and scars she doesn't name. Taking a job as Sawyer's nanny isn't part of some grand plan. It's a means of survival. A chance to feel useful, to keep going. What begins as an arrangement born of convenience slowly becomes something more... a shared quiet, a fragile trust, the slow thaw between two people who've learned to expect the worst. But grief lingers, and so does shame. And sometimes, love doesn't bloom right away. Sometimes it festers. Sometimes it has to rot before anything good can grow. ❪ f!oc & m!oc ❫ PEARLJARS © 2024 BOOK TWO of FOUR written by april