The Exes Emergency Contact: A Funny, Slow Burn Second Chance Romance

They got divorced fifteen years ago. Nobody told the paperwork.

Warren Doyle runs emergency management for a Michigan county. He's got four hundred and six plans for disasters that haven't happened yet, a binder for every one, and a reputation as the calmest man in any room that's currently on fire.

What he doesn't have is a plan for the hospital calling at eleven at night about Colleen Sheridan. His ex-wife. Who's apparently been listing him as her emergency contact since 2011.

Eight institutions. Eight for eight. Nobody ever updated one.

Colleen clears out dead people's houses for a living. She can walk into any home in the county and tell you what stays, what goes, and what nobody's ever going to resolve. She's the best in the state at it. She's never once applied the question to herself, and she'd like it noted that she has no plans to start.

Fixing this should take an afternoon.

It takes one county form. The form requires two signatures, in the same room, on the same day. The paragraph that makes it that hard was written in 2016 by Warren.

So now there's a flood on Larkspur Court. There's a pancake breakfast that needs nine hundred pancakes and has one working griddle zone. There's a daughter who's stopped pretending she can't see what's going on. And there are two people in their fifties who are magnificent together in a crisis and completely useless in a quiet room where nothing's wrong and somebody has to say what they want.

Being needed isn't the same as being wanted.

Neither of them has ever known the difference. They're going to have to learn it out loud, at a kitchen table, with nothing in the house to eat but crackers.

A later-in-life second chance romance about two competent adults, one clerical error, and fifteen years of forms that never got the message.

For readers who like: second chance romance, exes forced back together, later-in-life leads with real history, dual POV, dry deadpan humor, small town Michigan, competence in a crisis, slow burn with heat, and a guaranteed happily ever after.