Wednesday Solo:

Four years of federal time. A halfway house on Sycamore Street. A habit of counting every exit.

Tess Callahan stepped off a Greyhound in Harlan, Tennessee, with a duffel bag, sixty-two dollars, and a secret she didn't plan to tell. Four years ago she signed the transfer slips that sent her to federal prison. She told herself it was for her mother's medical bills. The court called it embezzlement. The county called her a felon. Now she's out, sleeping in her socks in a rented room above an alley, and a church secondhand store on the square is her last clean shot at a life.

Ruth Gentry is the store's seventy-two-year-old owner. She walked out of church in 1971, when a pastor looked her in the eye and told her her four-year-old boy had died for lack of faith. She didn't come back for thirty years. She hires Tess without asking for an explanation. She hands her a feather duster, a cup of coffee, and a kind of grace that doesn't demand a thing in return.

Eli Crowder runs the reentry program at Harlan Community Church. He's the pastor's son. He's quiet, he's steady, and he's been carrying a wreckage older than Tess's and twice as heavy. When they fall for each other, neither of them is prepared for what it costs.

Because a powerful alderman has decided the church's program is a problem. A spray can in the hands of a sixteen-year-old boy is spelling REDEMPTION in red across the hardware store window. And Tess — the woman who swore she'd never be the reason somebody else paid — is about to learn that grace isn't a bill you get to settle alone.

Grace isn't a loan. It isn't a thing you earn. It's what God gives because of who God is — and you only have to be standing in it when it comes.

A tender, unflinching story about real reentry, mentor love, earned forgiveness, and the stubborn small-town grace that refuses to let you pay twice for the same mistake.

Clean, faith-forward fiction.

Perfect for readers of Francine Rivers, Charles Martin, Lisa Wingate, and Karen Kingsbury who love redemption stories, flawed heroines, and the particular kind of second chance that begins the moment somebody hands you a feather duster and doesn't ask your name.