Embers at Bluebird Lake by William Liu

Fourteen years ago, Mara Bennett left Bluebird Lake on a bus and never looked back.

Now the lodge her aunt Ivy built has a roof torn off by a May storm, a reopening date nobody believes in, and one employee already on the payroll: Luke Callahan. Volunteer firefighter. Carpenter. The boy she left standing at that bus station — and the only man in town who knows exactly how to fix what's broken, as long as it isn't the two of them.

Mara came back to sell. Sign the papers, settle the estate, drive out past the town line before anyone could say welcome home. Instead she's living in a cottage that shares a wall with Luke's, running a lodge with a staff that remembers her at sixteen, and learning that in Bluebird, everybody knows before you do.

Luke has a job interview in Albany and a reason to take it. Mara has an offer waiting in the city and a life that fits her like the suit she bought for it. Neither of them says the obvious thing. Both of them keep knocking on the shared wall.

Then lightning strikes the East Ridge, the wind turns, and the fire comes down toward the only place either of them has ever called home.

Embers at Bluebird Lake is a slow-burn second-chance romance about the people who leave, the people who stay, and what it costs to finally stop running — with a hero who fights fires for free, a heroine who has never once asked for rescue, and a happily-ever-after earned on a dock at sunset.