Hard to Hold (Paperback)

Summer Chen wasn't supposed to end up back here. She had a career, a title, a trajectory — and then she stood up for the right thing in front of the wrong people and watched all of it disappear. Now she's thirty, sleeping in her childhood bedroom, and the renovation project was only ever supposed to be something to do with her hands while she figured out the rest.

Caleb Halvorsen was not part of the plan. He's quiet. Steady. The kind of man who builds shelves to the exact quarter-inch and remembers how you take your coffee before you've said it twice. Four years ago he stopped trusting his own eyes, and he's been standing still ever since, calling it enough. He has Mazy — nine, autistic, brilliant — the one person whose needs he never second-guesses.

Then Summer looks at his daughter like Mazy is the most interesting person in the room. Because she is. Caleb can see exactly what's happening between them. He just doesn't trust what he sees anymore.

Hard to Hold is about grief that doesn't announce itself, and learning that being truly seen is braver than being needed.