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

This morning, she had been sleeping in instead of going with Justin to the stable. It was the weekend, so Justin let out the horses and took them in. Normally, during the weeks, the new stable manager Sarah did all the tasks Justin had back when they first moved to this house.


It felt so weird that they’d lived here twelve years. It had gotten to a point where Harper could remember fuzzy details of her first home and some more vivid, happier ones from Dad’s old house, but that was it.


She got up and unwrapped her hair. When she’d gone to therapy that first year in California, her therapist had been a black woman called Anita. She’d taught Harper a lot about what it meant to be black, and with Dad and Justin’s blessing, Anita had become a mother figure—after she referred Harper to a colleague, of course.


Chapter 77