The Hollow Between Us
Twenty years after surrendering her newborn son to a closed adoption, Tessa Whitmore returns to the dying farmhouse in Cypress Hollow to bury her grandmother Eleanor and settle an estate she hasn't seen since she ran. The October wind carries more than dead leaves: it carries the scent of old woodsmoke, the creak of a porch that remembers her, and the weight of a letter Eleanor wrote but never sent. When Tessa learns that Nate Calloway , her son , has grown into a reserved young man working the neighboring land and helping raise a child of his own, the secret she's carried becomes a wound that refuses to stay closed. As Eleanor's journals surface, a hidden history emerges: a grandmother who tracked the boy across twenty years, who loved him in secret, who built a bridge between mother and son neither of them knew was missing. Tessa watches Nate with a grandson who doesn't know she's his mother, and the pull between them deepens into something neither can name. Maren Hollis, the sharp-eyed friend who remembers the old Tessa, watches the secret corrode her. The Portland lawyer holds documents that could end the silence. And at the center of it all stands little Eli, the child caught between two families who both want to claim him. Every truth Tessa uncovers risks the fragile peace Nate has built. Every day she stays pulls her deeper into the son she surrendered and the life he never knew she wanted. To honor Eleanor's love, Tessa must decide whether to keep the secret that protects her , or finally let her son see the mother who never stopped searching.