COMING SOON
Writing is funny. The Lucid Hours took me five full months. The Cost of Almost arrived in a matter of weeks. Sometimes you fly through a story as if it already exists somewhere and you're simply transcribing it. Sometimes it sends you back to page twenty-one and makes you start over. Many times.
The one I am currently writing is very kind to me. Perhaps because it is set in Muskoka. And yes, I can already hear you. Muskoka. Again. Yes. Because that is what Muskoka does. It helps, it heals, and it delivers. There is something about that landscape that refuses to let you be anything other than honest on the page.
I hope you'll enjoy another visit to that beautiful corner of Canada. It is especially lovely in June.
So. One June, Then Another.
One June, Then Another
There is a specific kind of silence that belongs only to Muskoka. It lives on the water in the early morning, in the spaces between the dock and the treeline, in the way a lake can hold an entire sky and still look perfectly still. I have spent a few summers listening to it. It is the kind of silence that makes room for things you have been avoiding. The kind that will not let you look away.
One June, Then Another is set in that silence.
In the summer of 2025, a woman named Melanie rents a cottage on a Muskoka lake. The man who owns the property next door is quiet, private, and careful in that very human way of someone who has been careful for a very long time. Maybe all his life. His name is Robin. They share a dock, a view, and eventually a bottle of wine. What they do not share, and what Melanie does not know and Robin cannot bring himself to say, is that they have met before. In a schoolyard in St. Catharines in June of 1985, when they were both fourteen years old and everything that followed was still possible.
She wrote a letter that summer. It reached the wrong hands. It cost her something she did not fully understand until she had spent forty years paying for it. Robin knows this. Robin has always known this because Robin was there, said nothing, and has been saying nothing, in one form or another, ever since.
This is a novel about love that arrives forty years late, guilt that never left, and the devastating grace of a second chance that no one is sure they deserve.
One June, Then Another. Coming soon.