Fall Line

By Maeve Ridge

He always leaves when the snow melts. This year, he can't.

Cal Ashby has one rule, and he's kept it for twelve years: when the lifts stop turning, he leaves. Every April the ski patroller trades Vermont for the other side of the world, with a green duffel bag packed and waiting by the door. No summers. No mud season. Nobody close enough to watch him go.

Then a closing-day rescue goes wrong, his knee gives out on the last run of the season, and Cal is stuck in Larch Hollow with a torn ligament, a borrowed couch and nine weeks of nothing.

Nora Bell hasn't let herself want anything since the night she lost her husband. She has a caf at the bottom of the mountain that's bleeding money, a seven-year-old who sells love advice at the counter for a quarter, and a Pancake Breakfast for three hundred people with no one to cook it. So when the grumpiest man in town takes over her griddle from a milk crate and flips every single pancake, she makes him an offer: cook for me until June.

It's supposed to be simple. It's temporary. It ends the day his flight leaves.

But mud season in Larch Hollow is long, and the caf kitchen is small. The brook is rising behind the building, a developer is circling the mountain, and the whole town is paying very close attention. Poppy Bell has already taped a list of rules over Cal's stool, and one of them is the promise he's never been able to keep: you have to say bye.

Nora has rules too. Nobody knows. It ends June tenth. Nobody falls in love.

They're going to break every single one.

Inside FALL LINE:
A grumpy ski patroller and the warm-hearted widow who runs the caf Forced proximity: one tiny kitchen, one spring flood, one apartment upstairsA seven-year-old matchmaker and her Notebook of Town SecretsA second chance at love after loss, handled with heartA nosy, big-hearted small town that shows up with casseroles and sandbagsOpen-door romance with a guaranteed happily ever afterFall Line is Book One of the Off-Season series. Each book follows a new couple in Larch Hollow, Vermont, and can be read as a standalone.

For adult readers. Contains explicit on-page intimacy and themes of grief, including the past death of a spouse.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HJZY8FSB
• ISBN13: 9798174754959
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 364 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.5"