Heartwood

A late-September afternoon, the diesel tick of a silenced chipper, and a notice that will shatter everything Maren Kovac thought she knew about her own roots. Maren works with her hands, coveralls, leather gloves, the smell of hydraulic fluid and cut black acacia. It's a life she's built carefully, one paycheck and one job site at a time. Then a phone call from a lawyer she doesn't recognize names her the heir to Heartwood: forty acres of old-growth timber her grandmother secreted away without ever speaking its name. The catch is simple and devastating. The land comes with a contract, a deadline, and Garrett Holt, the forester who's spent seven years coaxing the property back from neglect into something worth saving. Garrett has his own claim on the soil. He's planted seedlings where there were stumps, fought off Sterling Crane's bulldozers, and held a boundary Maren didn't draw. Now she's the one who decides whether Heartwood keeps standing or gets sold to the highest bidder. With the clock ticking on the inheritance terms and Holt watching her like she's the storm, Maren has to choose between the life she built and the roots she never knew she had, before someone else decides for her.