Harmony

Some towns bury what doesn't fit. She built something they couldn't stop.

Harmony, Georgia, 1992. Kimber is fourteen years old when she tells her parents the truth, and the town decides, almost overnight, exactly what to do with it. A locker gets a word scratched into it that three coats of primer never quite cover. A Sunday dinner goes silent and stays that way for years. And on an ordinary night on Route 9, a truck full of boys makes sure she understands what Harmony really thinks of her.

What she finds on the other side of that night is a card table at the county senior center, a box of donated paperbacks nobody bothered to sort, and a room full of people - an English teacher who won't look away, a retired carpenter with a secret of his own, a sharp-tongued widow with a shoebox of banned books - who decide, one Thursday at a time, that she's worth showing up for.

It isn't enough to keep her safe. Before it's over, Harmony will take more from her than she ever thought a town could take - and she'll spend the next thirty years finding out exactly what she's willing to build back, and what she's still not brave enough to let herself want.

Harmony is a story about the people who choose you when your own hometown won't, the loves that don't survive leaving home, and the ones that come back around decades later asking for a second chance you're not sure you can afford to give.

Some debts take thirty years to come due. This is the beginning of paying them.

Harmony is Book One of the unharmonious series.