Sawyer Rots.

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

COVER INSPO: @aastratta ❤︎