The Garland Street Series

GARLAND STREET

Contemporary Romance — Small-Town Romance

3-Book Series • Madison, Wisconsin • High-Heat, Open-Door • HEA

“One dead-end street. Three winters. Three hearts that learn love is the load-bearing wall.”

Garland Street is a dead-end block on the Madison isthmus where the porch lights come on early, everybody knows whose kid is whose, and nobody claps — they shovel. Across three consecutive winters, three guarded hearts learn the same lesson the hard way: love isn’t a disruption to a well-ordered life. It’s the load-bearing wall.

Binding every winter together is the fight for Garland Elementary — the little school Rita Alvarez, Director of Consolidation, keeps trying to close, and the neighborhood that keeps refusing to let it happen.

Three standalone happily-ever-afters. One interwoven street. One save-the-school campaign that turns neighbors into family.

Book One — Snow Day Protocol (Lawson & Sage)

“She moved four hundred miles to stop being somebody’s later. He has a plan for every emergency on earth — and no way at all to say one sentence about next year.”

Lawson Pike has lived on Garland Street for four years, since the ordinary Tuesday his wife died mid-argument, and he has spent every one of those years building his daughter a life with no moving parts. Pancakes cut into circles, not blobs. Plywood pre-cut to every window in the house. A schedule on the refrigerator that has never once let a six-year-old feel the floor move.

Then the worst house on the street sells to a pediatrician. Sage Okonkwo-Brandt has just driven four hundred miles from nine years of being somebody’s line item, and she has no intention of ever being penciled into anybody’s life again. She lasts about ninety seconds before a first-grader in a parka crosses the property line and makes the introductions herself.

Nine days later the district proposes to close Garland Elementary. A room full of tired parents makes Lawson and Sage co-chairs by acclamation. An ice-loaded oak comes through his kitchen wall in the middle of a blizzard. And the two of them turn out to be formidable in every room but their own.

Because Rita Alvarez does not have to beat their arithmetic. She only has to wait — and when she finds the seam between them, the price is a hundred and sixty children with no other doctor on this side of the isthmus.

Alternating First Person (Lawson & Sage) • HEA

Book Two — Load-Bearing (Sawyer & Colette)

“For a month, his eight-year-old son has not been where he said he would be — and when his father finally walks into the freezing studio two blocks away, the boy is at the barre, holding a line and meaning it.”

Sawyer Dunne builds things that hold. Five years ago a joist gave way three stories up and his knee went sideways under the weight of it; he came home from the emergency room on crutches to find his wife loading the car. He has braced the house alone ever since — every cabinet plumb, every seam sealed, four galvanized bolts in the treehouse checked every Sunday morning of his life.

Colette Beauvais came off a Chicago stage at thirty-one with an ankle that would not hold her and opened a studio in the old Garland’s Hardware building. She is months behind on a building that is giving up on her, and she does not take rescues. She takes trades. He keeps her ceiling off her head; she gets his knee back and teaches his son how to stand up straight. Every hour logged, both directions, no favors.

It works. That is the trouble with it. Because the boy has a notebook with three columns in it and only two of them have names — and then a certified letter arrives from Denver with PETITION FOR CUSTODY AMENDMENT across the top and Colette’s name in the third paragraph.

A man who has spent five years proving that a thing braced hard enough will not move decides the safest structure is the one with the weak member taken out. His son has been quietly proving something else all winter: a structure that cannot give fails without warning — and all at once.

Alternating First Person (Sawyer & Colette) • HEA

Book Three — The Dependent Line (Case & Frankie)

“He runs his five-year-old’s life on a laminated grid and hands the new babysitter a twelve-page contract. She reads all twelve pages, wins a clause — and has never once stayed anywhere long enough to be written into somebody’s plan.”

Case Mercado grew up in houses that got repossessed, and he has spent every year since making sure the ground under his daughter never moves. The spice jars are alphabetized. The routine chart is laminated. Every transition gets a two-minute verbal warning, and there is no spare capacity anywhere in the model.

Frankie Oyelaran walks the dogs on Garland Street and fosters its strays and has never stayed anywhere longer than a lease. Nobody ever put her out — they left, on purpose, every time. So when the block group text volunteers her for the Mercado childcare job at seven in the morning, she says yes. Being useful is the closest thing to being chosen that anyone has ever handed her.

Then the district drops a two-hundred-and-six-page packet in the courtyard, and Garland Elementary has one winter left. What Case finds on page ninety-eight is not a mistake — it is four hundred thousand dollars that walked out of the facilities budget into a cost center with no head, no headcount, and a mail drop on Fish Hatchery Road.

And what he does not tell anybody is that there is a second file on his laptop — private, ranked, tabbed — with a guaranteed partnership in Chicago at the top of it. Frankie has spent thirty-one years leaving before anyone could hand her a plan she was not in. Nobody warned her what it would cost to stay long enough to find out.

Alternating First Person (Case & Frankie) • HEA

Throughout All 3 Books

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Come shovel with us. ♥