The Scars We Carry: The timing was wrong. The love never was.

Mitch Barlow was supposed to be Rita Blackwell’s match once.

He never showed.

Years later, he returns to Willow Creek carrying old regrets, a dangerous investigation, and the kind of steady certainty Rita has spent her entire life learning not to trust.

Because people leave.

They always do.

Rita survived being the town’s whispered scandal by building walls no one gets through twice. Especially not a man who already walked away once before.

But working beside Mitch pulls her into something far more dangerous than the traps hidden around the lake:
hope.

The closer they get, the harder it becomes to ignore the connection neither of them expected to survive the past.

Mitch wants to prove he’s not the man who left.

Rita wants to believe him.

But love was never the problem.

Trusting it is.