Freight, Flowers & Foolish Optimism: A Romantic Comedy

By Dalton Douglas

Fletcher Ford likes systems that work, schedules that hold, and loading zones that stay exactly what they were designed to be. As the operations manager of Dalton's old freight depot, he has no interest in "reimagining" anything-especially not with flowers, string lights, or community-facing optimism.

Harrison Hayes sees potential everywhere.

Polished, creative, and impossible to intimidate, Harrison has been brought in to explore whether part of the old station district can become something more than an industrial space. Fletcher thinks Harrison is one more charming disaster with a tablet and no respect for freight operations. Harrison thinks Fletcher is a deeply competent man who has mistaken control for safety and misery for personality.

Unfortunately, they're both wrong in the most inconvenient way.

When a launch event, a scheduling headache, and a series of increasingly public test runs force them into close collaboration, Fletcher and Harrison find themselves building something neither of them planned: a system that works, a district the town actually wants, and a partnership that feels dangerously less temporary by the day.

But revitalization comes with pressure, visibility, and the kind of risk Fletcher does not tolerate lightly. If one wrong move can shut the whole project down, trusting Harrison may be the most operationally unsound decision Fletcher has ever made.

Set in Dalton, Maine, Freight, Flowers & Foolish Optimism is a small-town romantic comedy featuring grump/sunshine energy, competence clash, logistics-versus-aesthetics tension, repeated-contact chemistry, public chaos, emotional restraint, and two highly capable men discovering that structure and beauty were never the real opposites.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GXRWVP9T
• ISBN13: 9798257977329
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 406 Pages
• Weight: 1.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"