A warm, slow-burn contemporary romance about good bread, old buildings, and second chances.
Gia Moretti has spent years keeping Prova exactly where it belongs: on the corner of Merchant Street, feeding the dockworkers before dawn, slipping extra bread into the hands of anyone who needs it, and pretending the numbers in her ledger aren’t getting harder to ignore.
Then Abel Kane takes the middle stool.
He arrives every morning at seven with a folding rule in his pocket, an engineer’s eye for everything that’s out of true, and remarkably little to say. Gia feeds him anyway. Soon he’s fixing the things she stopped noticing, learning to shape bread beside her at four in the morning, and becoming part of a neighborhood that has always known the difference between a customer and someone who belongs.
What Gia doesn’t know is why Abel came to Merchant Street in the first place.
He was hired to assess her century-old building for a developer with plans for the block. But the deeper Abel looks, the clearer the truth becomes: Prova isn’t failing. Neither is the community built around it.
And the closer he gets to Gia, the harder it becomes to hide that his name is attached to the threat against everything she has spent her life holding together.
When the truth finally reaches the other side of the counter, saving the bakery may require more than proving the building can stand. Gia will have to learn how to ask others to stand with her—and Abel will have to decide what his word, his work, and the woman he has fallen for are worth.
A warm, slow-burn contemporary romance about good bread, old buildings, second chances, and the people who become family simply by showing up.
