No Punchline for this: A clean Christian Romance

By Vanessa Richards

I have a rule: if you can make it funny, you can survive it.

I've been running that rule since I was sixteen, standing at my parents' graves in Cedarbrook, Tennessee, deciding that God was either absent or uninterested. I've been running it through two seasons of a network sitcom, a comedy club circuit that never quite lands where I thought it would, and fourteen years of very deliberate distance from the small town that knows me too well.

Then Marcus dies.

And the floor is gone.

I drive to Cedarbrook in the dark with no material for this. What I have is a fourteen-year-old waiting on the porch steps with a sleeping bag and a star chart, a sixteen-year-old who looks exactly like my brother and has decided the best response to grief is to feel nothing at all, and eleven casseroles I didn't ask for. I have a church at the top of the hill I have absolutely no intention of entering.

And I have Drake Preston.

Drake Preston, who was the quiet boy who blushed at lockers and built model airplanes, and is now built like a man who has been through a war - because he has. He's somehow a pastor now. Which is inconvenient, because it means he is always there. Grief group. Church steps. My front porch at seven in the morning when I run out of jokes and don't know what else to do with my hands.

He was Marcus's friend. He knows things about me I haven't said out loud. He sees me the way I have spent fifteen years learning to avoid being seen.

I don't have a bit for that.

I don't have a bit for any of this, actually. Not for two boys who need an aunt who doesn't know how to do this. Not for a faith I left in a parking lot on prom night that has apparently just been sitting there, waiting, very patiently, for me to stop running. Not for a man who has been holding the light on since we were teens and never once made me feel the weight of it.

I'm Alexa Cole. I've made a career out of finding the joke in everything.

This is the story where I couldn't.

And it's the best thing that ever happened to me.

Perfect for readers who love small-town romance with real emotional depth, warm faith themes, and a guaranteed happily ever after.

Sweet romance. No content beyond a first kiss.

She hadn't lost faith. She'd just been looking for it in every place that wasn't home.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GZMTX17V
• ISBN13: 9798195653606
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 182 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"