Title: A Soft Place to Fall
Author: Liz Flaherty
Genre: Contemporary Inspirational Romance
Book Blurb:
Early McGrath doesn't want freedom from her thirty-year marriage to Nash, but when it's forced upon her, she does the only thing she knows to do - she goes home to the Ridge to reinvent herself.
Only what is someone who's spent her life taking care of other people supposed to do when no one needs her anymore? Even as the threads of her life unravel, she finds new ones - reconnecting with the church of her childhood, building the quilt shop that has been a long-time dream, and forging a new friendship with her former husband.
The definition of freedom changes when it's combined with faith, and through it all perhaps Early and Nash can find a Soft Place to Fall.
Excerpt:
Springtime
Freedom.
Earline McGrath didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so she went into the garden and planted carrots. Nash hated carrots.
This morning they’d met oh-so-civilly in his brother’s law office to finalize the division of thirty years’ accumulation of things like DVD players and Christmas tree ornaments with “Logan, Fist Graid” written on them in glitter glue. Now it seemed important to her to do something her husband disliked. Planting carrots made more sense than rearranging furniture and was easier on the back even if it was hard on the knees.
Somewhere in the nightmare that was the three-car garage built to look like a wing on their pseudo-Victorian house, there were some kneepads from when the girls played high school volleyball. Early needed to find them. Only thing was, she’d find other stuff, too. Baby sleepers with spit-up stains, old diaries she should have burned years ago, and early marriage melamine dishes that would make her eyes sting and turn her heart into skip-a-beat mush.
They’d married the day after Nash graduated, when Early was barely sixteen, just finishing up her sophomore year at the tiny high school in the middle of nowhere, Kentucky. She’d been eight weeks pregnant, but hardly anyone had known except Early’s friends Mary Brad, Lou Ann, and Emily. Even when she gave birth to Evan seven months later and he weighed in at nearly nine pounds, she’d scarcely looked pregnant.
But, regardless of how she looked, her water broke in the produce department of Waylon’s Supersaver, where Nash was peeling outer leaves off heads of cabbage for minimum wage. Patty Waylon had taken one look at the mess in aisle three and hollered, “Nash McGrath, put down those cabbages and get her to the hospital now!”
Nash hurried, but a train blocked their path and Evan Davis McGrath was born at the corner of Evans and Market with only his father and Mike Davis from the Marathon filling station in attendance. Mike said it was a quite a way to become someone’s godfather.
Sitting in the loamy soil of her garden remembering the day Evan was born, Early decided she might as well laugh. In all truth, she’d laughed more in her thirty years with Nash than she’d cried, so it came naturally enough. Besides, it wasn’t as though they were mad at each other or their feelings were hurt. That was part of their problem; their feelings for each other didn’t seem to go deep enough anymore to be hurt.
“Girl, you look a little mindless sitting there in the radishes and the green onions laughing at nothing.”
“Not the first time, now, is it?” She slanted a smile at her father-in-law. “Did you want something, Ben?”
“Thought maybe you’d feel like a walk.” He grinned back at her, the expression crooked and irresistible and exactly like the ones his sons turned on people at the slightest provocation. “If you can make it as far as Donna’s Diamond Dairy, I might be coerced into springing for an ice cream.”
“Two dips?”
His nod propelled her to her feet with an inward sigh. The knees that had supported her unflinchingly for forty-six years, through learning to ride a bicycle, roller skate, and lots of praying and repenting, tired a lot more quickly than they used to. That was all there was to it. She might have to break down and move furniture after all, unless she was willing to find those kneepads. She would put Nash’s recliner in the garage, just set it smack in the middle of the spot where he used to park his SUV, and while she was at it, she’d shove the big television he was so fond of out there, too. Then she could rent the garage to someone whose life had caught a change-up and left him bereft of a remote control and his own oversized chair. He could use the melamine dishes, too, and keep soft drinks and sliced cheese in the little refrigerator the kids had used at college.
“You sure this is what you want?” Ben waited until they were closer to Donna’s than to the house to ask.
Only the promise of two dips of strawberry cheesecake ice cream kept her from turning on her heel and heading back toward the gated entry of Canterbury Crossing. She walked in silence for a few minutes, not sure what to say to this man she’d loved all these many years.
“I’m not the one who left,” she said evenly.
Buy Links (including Goodreads and BookBub):
Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/hn9m6t4s
Books2Read: https://books2read.com/u/bW57yx
Goodreads: https://tinyurl.com/4sukhycs
BookBub: https://tinyurl.com/5at5z3eh
What makes your featured book a must-read?
Early and Nash are in their late forties, they’re tired, and they’ve failed at both their marriage and their faith. There is so much hope in how they find their way back that even as their story’s writer, I am encouraged by it. I hope readers are, too.
Giveaway –
Enter to win a $20 Amazon gift card:
Open Internationally. You must have a valid Amazon US or Amazon Canada account to win.
Runs February 3 – February 13, 2023.
Winner will be drawn on February 14, 2023.
Author Biography:
USA Today bestselling author Liz Flaherty started writing in the fourth grade when her Aunt Gladys allowed her to use her portable Royal typewriter. The truth was that her aunt would have let her do anything to get her out of her hair, but the typewriter and the stories it could produce caught on, and Liz never again had a day without a what if… in it.
She and Duane, her husband of at least forever, live in a farmhouse in central Indiana, sharing grown children, spoiled cats, and their grandkids, the Magnificent Seven. (Don’t get her started on them—you’ll be here all day.) To find out more about her, stop by http://lizflaherty.net/ or sign up for her newsletter at http://eepurl.com/df7dhP.
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