Eastern Standard - Sierra Spencer

"Maybe he loved me because he wanted to add a piece of sunshine to endless midnights."

Olivia Carrington met her husband in a bar on the Upper East Side. She lost him on the same street, nine blocks down.

Three months after his death, she moves to Connor Bay, the small New England town where he grew up. Olivia has never been there before. She's a stranger with a New York accent, a temporary address, and a connection to the town's grief that no one asked for.

Connor Bay remembers him as a son, a friend, a sure thing. Olivia remembers him as her husband. Keating Whitaker remembers him as everything.

Whit is steady where Olivia is unraveling. He belongs to Connor Bay in a way she never will, and he knows the man she loved in ways she never had the chance to. He's also the last person she should want anything from, especially not the quiet understanding, the shared grief, or the pull between them that feels like both relief and betrayal.

But grief has a way of rearranging boundaries.

As Olivia tries to help save her husband's family diner, survive a town that doesn't quite want her, and figure out who she is without the life she planned, she and Whit find themselves orbiting each other-drawn together by shared history, unspoken guilt, and a pull that feels equal parts comfort and catastrophe.

Because loving Whit would mean loving someone who belongs to the place that never entirely belonged to her. And staying away might hurt just as much.

Eastern Standard is a steamy, tender small-town romance about loving after loss, being the outsider in someone else's home, and discovering that healing doesn't always arrive in the shape you expect.

Sometimes it looks like the one person you were never supposed to notice at all.