Liza rolled hers. “You need a vacation. Or a man. Preferably both.”
He turned. And Mira’s heart did a strange, stuttering thing. He was tall, built like a man who worked with his hands, with a sharp jaw and eyes the color of good bourbon—warm amber flecked with gold. But it wasn’t his looks that stole her breath. It was the absence.
He grabbed her wrist. “That’s the name of the woman who built my farmhouse. Isabelle Byrne. My great-great-grandmother. She disappeared in 1918. No one ever knew why.”
The man arrived three days later, in the form of a flat tire on a rain-slicked back road. Mira was driving home with a load of Depression glass when she saw the vintage Ford pickup pulled over, hazards blinking. A man stood in the downpour, his dark hair plastered to his forehead, muttering curses at a lug wrench. Miras - Nora Roberts
She pulled over. A Nora Roberts heroine always did.
Mira’s hands trembled as she reached for the locket. The moment her fingers touched the obsidian, a flood of images crashed over her: a woman in a green dress, weeping. A locket snapped shut as a door slammed. A name, whispered in the dark: Isabelle.
“You’re a superstitious old crone in a young woman’s body,” her best friend, Liza, teased, dangling a pair of silver-backed hairbrushes in front of her. “Come on. These are gorgeous.” Liza rolled hers
“Need a hand?” she called, grabbing her umbrella.
His eyes—those bourbon-warm eyes—narrowed. “You’re a terrible liar.”
Then he stopped in front of the back room. The door was closed, bolted. “What’s in there?” Preferably both
Now, at twenty-eight, Mira ran a small antique shop in the sleepy Vermont town of Havenwood. It wasn’t the life she’d planned—she had a degree in art history, a talent for restoration, and a fierce independence that scared off most men before the second date. But the shop, Yesterday’s News , was her anchor. And she curated it with a single, ironclad rule: No mirrors.
“Mira Delaney. And you’re welcome.”
Caleb let out a slow breath. Then he took the locket from her hands, closed it, and pressed it into her palm. “Then let’s go find her,” he said. “Together.”
“Both,” she said, surprising herself. “Neither. Depends on the day.”
Mira looked at him—this man with no ghosts, no shadows, nothing but steady warmth and stubborn faith. And for the first time in her life, she looked at a reflection and didn’t flinch. Because when she caught her own eyes in the dark glass of the workshop window, she saw not fear, but courage. And love.