Worth Staying

The hardest thing Carys Merritt has ever done isn't leaving. It's staying.

She can pack a car in under twenty minutes. She's done it through a marriage, a divorce, and sixteen years of promising her son the next place will be better. So when her mother's hands start shaking over the café griddle, she tells herself the same clean lie she tells everyone: just for the winter.

She doesn't plan to feel anything driving back up the bluff road into Saltwood. She doesn't plan on her boy spiking a fever their first night in town. And she absolutely does not plan on the one lit window in the dark belonging to the clinic - or on the man inside it.

Elias Reyes stayed. He built a life out of an underfunded exam room and a light he leaves on because someone might need it. He was twenty-three the last time Carys stood in a room with him. He hasn't forgotten the bathhouse steps - or the word he said to her there.

Stay.

Now she's three blocks from his clinic with a sick teenager, a fading mother, and a list of reasons to run she's been writing since she was eighteen. The town remembers her. The doctor remembers her. And the longer she stays, the harder it gets to find her keys.

How do you leave a place that finally feels like staying?

Worth Staying is an open-door, second-chance small-town romance - emotional, slow burn, a single mom, the town doctor, and on-page spicy scenes for grown-ups. Saltwood, Book Two. A complete standalone love story.