Greta Mercer comes back to Ridgeline with a six-year-old, a Honda full of stuffed animals, and a bank account that can't afford one more thing going wrong.
The mountain town she fled at eighteen hasn't changed much. The rent is cheaper than Denver, the winters are brutal, and Cal Calloway still answers her texts in under a minute.
Cal builds things. Bookshelves, kitchens, half the storefronts on Main Street. What he's never built is the nerve to tell his best friend he's loved her since they were kids — not before she married the wrong man, and not now, when she's standing in a rundown rental with her daughter and a life that needs repairing. So he does what he's always done. He shows up. Coffee in hand, toolbox in the truck, dog trailing behind him, heart locked somewhere she can't see it.
Day by day, he fixes what's broken. The sagging porch. The drafty windows. The walls Greta built around herself after a marriage that taught her not to count on anyone. And Piper — gap-toothed, dinosaur-obsessed, hungry for someone who keeps his promises — starts looking at Cal like he hangs the moon.
Greta knows better than to fall for her best friend. He's the one person she can't afford to lose.
Then her ex-husband decides he wants back what he walked away from, and the fragile life she's rebuilding is suddenly on the line. Now Cal has to choose between staying quietly beside her — and fighting, out loud, for the family he's wanted all along.
Always Been Yours is a warm, slow-burning story about second chances, small towns, and coming home to the person who never left. Open the door.
FOR READERS WHO LOVE: single mom heroines, friends to lovers, he falls first, blue-collar small town heroes, found family with kids and dogs
