Grace Miller-Auclair inherited her grandmother's chair at the Millhaven Confluence Trust eighteen months ago, and she has run it exactly by the book ever since - because the alternative is admitting how much of it she's still grieving. What she doesn't expect is for her own hands to start pulling her into the past every time they touch water, or for a company with her family's oldest enemy's name on the letterhead to file a claim on the one piece of ground her ancestors swore would never again belong to a single man's ambition.Desmond Okafor has spent eight years since Mali making sure no one's safety ever again depends on trusting him alone - checked twice, carried solo, paid for out of his own pocket if that's what it takes. He has no patience for a company using his own bridge report as a pretext for a land grab, and even less for how quickly the Trust's prickly, precedent-obsessed coordinator gets past every wall he's spent a decade building.Then Grace's Kindling finally delivers the whole truth her family has kept in a locked drawer for over a century: a dam that failed in 1919 through one man's negligence, a young woman blamed for a disaster she died trying to prevent, and a founding act of quiet defiance that has been waiting a hundred years for someone brave enough to say it out loud.As a private security fence closes around the river, a flood rises faster than anyone's plans, and the whole town gathers to decide what its own history is worth, Grace and Desmond have to learn the one lesson four generations of careful, well-meaning people never quite managed - that the safest thing you can do with the truth, and with each other, was never to carry it alone.The concluding novel of a beloved series, where every river finally runs into one. A warm, deeply researched small-town Canadian romance about the courage it takes to stop mistaking control for safety, and start trusting the people who show up to carry it with you.
