The Secondhand Heart

Maya Ellis is the best repairwoman in Brooklyn. Radios, lamps, cracked vases, appliances other people abandon on the curb — if it's broken, she can bring it back to life. She's never met a thing she couldn't fix.

Except her own heart.

Three years after a devastating betrayal, Maya has rules. Don't trust sad eyes. Don't get attached to temporary addresses. Don't let anyone get close enough to leave a note on the kitchen table and a hole in your chest. The rules have kept her safe. The rules have also kept her alone.

When a flash flood devastates the neighborhood, Maya volunteers to save Whitaker & Daughter Books — the crooked little bookshop at the end of Atlantic Avenue that has hosted story hours, reading groups, and lost souls for decades. And there, waist-deep in ruined paperbacks, she clashes with the owner's nephew: Daniel Whitaker, a burned-out architect in a wrecked gray sweater, carrying armfuls of drowned science fiction with grim determination.

Daniel has spreadsheets. Daniel has plans. Daniel has come to help his aunt Ruth decide what to do with a failing building that is worth more empty than full — and he has already decided the answer. Demolish. Sell. Move on. It's what he does. It's all he has left, since the glass-tower career and the marriage that loved the blueprint more than the man collapsed around him.

But Maya doesn't fix buildings with spreadsheets. She listens to them. And the more time they spend restoring the shop shelf by shelf — the hand-hewn joists, the speakeasy staircase bricked up since Prohibition, the brass heron lamp with its broken neck — the more she starts to believe that some things aren't failing. They're just waiting for someone patient enough to stay. And Daniel, against every rule he's ever lived by, starts to wonder if the life he swore he didn't want is the only one that ever fit him.

As the neighborhood rallies to save the shop, as the past walks back through both their doors — a note-leaver with a box of apologies, an ex-wife with a clean subject line — Maya and Daniel must decide what they're really repairing. A building? Each other? Or the part of themselves they wrote off long ago?

Tender, funny, and quietly wise, THE SECONDHAND HEART is a clean contemporary romance about second chances, found family, and the difference between a thing that's broken and a thing that's unfinished. Perfect for readers who love slow-burn chemistry, bookshop settings, grumpy/sunshine banter, and happily-ever-afters that feel earned.

This is Book One of the Brooklyn Repairs series — each book follows a new couple in the same beloved neighborhood, with Ruth's bookshop at the heart of it all.

WHAT READERS ARE SAYING:"A love letter to bookshops, to Brooklyn, and to everyone who has ever been afraid to want something permanent." — Advance reader

"This is the kind of romance that restores your faith in people — and makes you want to adopt a seventy-one-year-old bookseller immediately." — Advance reader