Dragonfly Creek

Firefly Hollow Essentials - Book Four

They fell in love the summer they were nineteen, the kind of love that happens in stolen hours and secret dates—because Ainsley's mother controlled everything her daughter touched, including who she was allowed to love. Then, without warning, Ainsley was gone: engaged to another man, married within weeks, gone from Ben's life with nothing but a letter that told him only a version of the truth. Devastated, he went back to college, leaving his innocence and his heart behind.

Five years later, Ben comes home to Hazard, Kentucky, ready to finally lay the memory of their romance to rest. Ainsley comes home too—not for him, but to bury the mother she spent her whole life fighting and never forgave, and to close the door on a town that still holds every wound that woman left behind. Neither expects to find the other still there.

They tell themselves it's just the pull of old history, something to work out of their systems before they go their separate ways again. But history doesn't stay old for long. Under the same summer sky where it all started, casual becomes something neither of them wants to name, and a fragile hope starts to take root where there used to be only grief.

Then an old family secret resurfaces, slotting perfectly into every doubt Ben has carried since the day she left.

Their second chance won't survive on silence, or on who they've each imagined the other to be. This time, they'll have to tell each other everything—and trust what's left standing when the imagined version falls away.

Dragonfly Creek is the fourth book in the Firefly Hollow series, an Appalachian family saga.

Content note: This book portrays the loss of a pregnancy. Grief is given room in these pages, and it is not resolved quickly.