Borrowed Time
Description
Wren Cafferty hasn't been home in two years. A children's book editor in New York, she returns to Ashby, North Carolina, for two weeks to settle her mother's affairs after a stroke. The house smells like cinnamon. The task list has forty-seven items. The plan is simple: sort, sell, leave.
The plan does not include Sam Hollis.
Sam is the town librarian, a man who loses his phone in cookie jars and his sentences in tangents and who has been reading to children in Wren's mother's basement every Tuesday and Thursday. He held a bookmark with her mother's name on it for six months because a bookmark is a promise to return.
Two weeks. Borrowed time in a town she left at eighteen. But borrowed time has a way of becoming the only time that matters.
A warm, funny, devastating novel about mothers and daughters, the things we hold and the things we bend, and a kiss that tastes like coffee, salt, and cinnamon.