The Way We Fall - A Small Town, Grumpy/Sunshine Romance #989118

She came back to say goodbye to her grandmother's cottage. She didn't plan on finding him already inside.
Seven years. Two people who never had a real ending. One six-week restoration contract that neither of them can walk away from.
Willa Harte has spent the better part of a decade writing beautifully about places she never stayed — travel essays, Substack dispatches from cities she passed through, a Portland apartment she rents furnished because settling down always felt like giving in. When her grandmother Nora dies and leaves her a Victorian cottage in the Vermont town she walked away from at twenty-two, Willa's plan is clean and simple: settle the estate, take the developer's offer, leave.
Except Ethan Cole is already there.
Quiet. Precise. Closed-off in ways he wasn't before. He's restoring the cottage's original woodwork under a contract Nora arranged — and paid in full — before she died. Six weeks left on the job. No intention of going anywhere. And absolutely no intention of letting Willa know that her leaving still costs him something, every single day.
What neither of them knows is that the silence between them wasn't indifference. It was a misunderstanding. A rumour that reached her before the truth did. Two twenty-two-year-olds who loved each other too carefully to say so — and who have spent seven years paying for that restraint in separate, quietly lonely ways.
The Way We Fall is a slow-burn second chance romance about swallowed words, the wrong kind of love — the kind that lets go when it should hold on — and whether the real thing, the stubborn, specific, knows-your-coffee-order-after-seven-years kind, can survive finally hearing the truth.
Set in a Vermont autumn, with a grumpy woodworker hero who builds things to last and a sunshine heroine finally learning to stop moving.
One cottage. Six weeks. Seven years of the wrong silence.
Some falls are worth every moment of the landing.