The Things We Call Enough

Dace Tamar came home from Kettermoor knowing exactly what her careful distance from Soren had cost her. She still hasn't done anything about it. Three years into running the Tamar family's negotiations, Dace is the person everyone in Vetharn relies on: precise, capable, indispensable. When a complex Aldric trade commission lands in her hands, it's the kind of work she's built her whole life around, work that makes her essential and asks nothing more of her than that. Soren is back too. Route assessor, old friend, the one person who remembers who Dace was before she became this efficient. The equilibrium between them has held for two years on careful distance and professional courtesy. It is starting to cost more than it gives back. As the commission moves toward its final, high-stakes session, Dace finds the careful management she's relied on running out, not because anything has gone wrong, but because something has finally gone right enough to notice. What she discovers, on a roof above the harbor and in a chart room she knows better than her own house, is that being essential and being known have never been the same thing, and that the second one is still waiting for her to choose it. A quiet, warm story about competence, belonging, and the difference between a life that works and a life that's yours. Book 3 in the Kettermoor series.

Pagina's: 224, Paperback, Independently published