Justin O'Dwyer is 19. Four days ago, his mother died of a drug overdose, and now Justin is back in Enterprise, Oregon, trying to figure out how to raise the younger siblings he's afraid of losing to the foster system. Justin is completely out of his depth. Harper is six, and hates him. Wyatt is four and doesn't remember him. And baby Scarlett, at fourteen months, has never even met her big brother before. When Scarlett gets sick and won't stop screaming, and when Harper runs off in the middle of the night, Justin is at the end of his tether. In desperation, he knocks on a neighbor's door begging for help.<br><br>Del Abbot is 38, and living in his grandparents' old place in Enterprise after his marriage broke down and he lost his restaurant in the divorce. He's a chef, even had his own show on cable for a while, but now he's looking for a new start, if he could just figure out what exactly that entails. When the O'Dwyer family barrels into his life one night, Del can't refuse to help. What begins as a trip to the hospital becomes a regular child-minding gig while Justin struggles to find his feet. And the more time Del spends with Justin, the more they both want more than friendship. But small town life comes with its own bigotry, and, in Justin's case, that bigotry has always been close to home.<br><br>When an act of violence threatens to destroy the small family they've built, both Justin and Del need to put aside their pasts and reach for their future together.

Family Recipe

Justin had a sudden flash of memory. He’d been fifteen, and Harper must have only been about two. He could remember packing her teddy bears and her dolls into a bag and bringing them down here. Setting them up on the tree stump so they could all have a picnic together. Drinking water out of the cups he’d brought from the kitchen, and calling it a tea party. And Harper’s face lit up with a grin as she babbled away at him.


He’d left not long after that, because he couldn’t take being around Mom anymore. Mom and her string of “boyfriends”, each one worse than the last. He hadn’t run away exactly. He’d stayed in contact. Just, it was better to crash on some friend’s couch than stay in the house when he and Mom were fighting so much back then.


Harper said she couldn’t remember him, and maybe that was true, but Justin remembered those tea parties at the old tree stump with sudden, stinging clarity.


“Harper,” Justin said now. “We have to take Scarlett to the hospital.”


Chapter 4