{"product_id":"things-we-couldnt-keep","title":"Things We Couldn't Keep","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEight years sober. Six years away. One man who answered the phone the night it all went wrong, and is, as it turns out, the only reason she ever made it back.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eFrom the umbrella pen name behind a 10-book romance launch, Sloane Ashford. Spice: 3 chilies. Always HEA.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNell Hartigan was thirty when she lost her four-year-old daughter to a custody decision she did not contest. She was thirty when she walked into the recovery program her husband had been begging her to enter for two years, and thirty when she signed the paperwork that gave her ex-husband Marcus permanent custody, and thirty when she sat in the parking lot of her sister's apartment in Portland and decided she would not come home until she was a woman her daughter could be proud to know.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShe is thirty-eight, eight years sober, and finally coming home.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCrow's Cove, Oregon is one diner, one gas station, one veterinary practice, and one childhood that Nell Hartigan never thought she would be brave enough to walk back into. Her daughter Eve is twelve. Her ex-husband Marcus is remarried to a woman named Sarah who Nell has heard about for three years and has decided, sight unseen, to like. Her mother is dead. Her sister Margo is in Portland and getting married in November. And the man she expects to be most furious with her, the man who answered the phone at four A.M. the night Nell finally crashed her car into the side of a Quik Stop and decided to live, is, for reasons Nell does not deserve, the only person in Crow's Cove who has been quietly defending her to the town for eight years.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMac Ackley is forty. The town vet. Marcus's older brother. The man who sat with Nell in the hospital that morning while she signed the voluntary commitment, who drove her to the program in Eugene, who has, every Christmas for the last eight years, sent her a postcard with one sentence on it. \u003cem\u003eEve is okay. Mac.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhat Nell expects, coming home, is a careful coexistence: a polite divorce-in-law from a town that hasn't forgotten what she was. What she gets is Mac Ackley standing in her grandmother's kitchen with a wrench, fixing the under-sink leak Nell hadn't told anyone about, saying, \u003cem\u003e\"You don't have to do this alone, Nellie. You never had to. I'm sorry it took us this long to figure that out.\"\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is not a love-at-first-sight book. They have known each other for sixteen years and were never not in love and never said it once. This is a book about being thirty-eight and finding out the person who quietly chose you eight years ago is still choosing you, and about being twelve and meeting your mother for the first time in eight years and deciding she gets to be your mother again, and about being forty and finding out you have been the one \u003cem\u003ehandling it\u003c\/em\u003e the entire time and your reward is the woman who didn't think she got to come home.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThings We Couldn't Keep\u003c\/strong\u003e is a small-town second-chance single-mom romance for readers of Colleen Hoover's \u003cem\u003eReminders of Him\u003c\/em\u003e, Abby Jimenez's \u003cem\u003eJust for the Summer\u003c\/em\u003e, and Emily Henry's \u003cem\u003eBeach Read\u003c\/em\u003e. Book 1 of the Crow's Cove trilogy. Each book is a different couple in the same coastal town. Standalone. Spice: 3 chilies. CWs at the front of the book.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTropes I'd cry on a coastal cliff for: redemption-arc heroine, ex-husband's brother, the man who answered the phone at four A.M.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePick your room. xx Sloane.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Sloane Ashford","offers":[{"title":"Volume 1 (Things We Couldn't Keep)","offer_id":44645343199315,"sku":null,"price":29.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Volume 1 + 2 (Things We Couldn't Keep + Things We Couldn't Forgive)","offer_id":44645343232083,"sku":null,"price":54.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Complete Trilogy (Things We Couldn't Keep, Forgive, Say)","offer_id":44645343264851,"sku":null,"price":74.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/4986\/4531\/files\/design1_emotional_hook_4018562c-9414-4efb-ad5c-f710cbb9cb14.png?v=1779422538","url":"https:\/\/silkthorn.com\/products\/things-we-couldnt-keep","provider":"Silkthorn","version":"1.0","type":"link"}