Where the Lavender Grows
Margot Ellingham drives a rental car down a gravel road that ends at a stone cottage in Hickory Hollow, Maine , an inheritance from an aunt she barely knew, and an excuse to disappear from a life she no longer wants. Inside the cottage, dust covers everything except the dried lavender bunches still hanging from the beams, and a lawyer's letter points her toward overgrown fields her aunt never let bloom. The locals are wary in the way small towns are of outsiders, especially Wesley Barlow, whose quiet attention feels more like surveillance than welcome. But Theo , a voice on the cottage's old telephone, calling about a debt he insists Margot has inherited , refuses to let her look the other way. As Margot sorts through her aunt Cordelia's things, she uncovers a hidden correspondence, a long-buried love affair, and a rift between two families that never healed. With the first snow threatening to cut the hollow off for the season, Margot must choose between selling the cottage, taking the money, and returning to the life she's running from , or staying to learn the truth about Cordelia, the lavender, and the brothers whose grudge has shaped this place for decades. The inheritance, it turns out, was never the cottage. It was the story.