He told her in November that he would be gone in March. She let him stay anyway.

Margie Fontaine has run Bend House on Cypress Street for six years. Six rooms, two children, a boiler from 1978, and a nightly rate she has not raised since her husband died. It works, the way a thing works when one person does all of it and nobody asks how.

Owen Reese arrives in the second week of November, pays three months in advance in cash, and tells her before he takes his coat off that he will be gone by spring.

Then he starts fixing the house. A stair tread. A gate. A porch pier that has been sinking since 2011. He will not take a dollar off the rent for any of it, he will not explain himself, and after four weeks there is not one person in Ashpole County who can establish a single fact about where he came from.

In January the county reassessment nearly triples the tax on a 1908 four-square, and Margie has until the first of April to find money that does not exist. There is one way out. It runs straight through the work a stranger has been doing for free, and it requires her to stand up in front of a county board and say out loud, for the first time in her life, that what she has is worth something.

Book three of the Hartley Bend series. Sweet, closed door, and a guaranteed happy ending. Each book stands alone.