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

“And, tell me if I’m overstepping, please,” Del had said, and put a book into Justin’s hands.


It was a book about kids. About what they needed at different stages, and what to expect. The thing was thick as a brick, but Justin had devoured it over the next few days, reading through it faster than he had any GED study guide. He even took it to work with him and read it on his breaks. A lot of the stuff in it was common sense, Justin guessed, but it helped to have it all written down in black and white. It helped to read through it all so that he’d be a little more prepared for whatever the next crisis was, because Justin had learned on that fraught night with the trip to the hospital that common sense was the first thing that up and vanished when everyone was stressed out.


Chapter 32