Petals on the 7:14

About this book

Fourteen months after losing her mother, Joy Nwankwo is holding the family flower shop together when a redevelopment notice arrives, and a buttoned-up grump in the quiet car reports her for one whispered phone call. A sweet, closed-door grumpy-sunshine romance.

Joy Nwankwo can rescue anyone’s worst day with the right bunch of flowers — except, lately, her own.

Fourteen months after losing her mother, Joy is holding the family flower shop together with sunshine, stubbornness, and a half-finished crossword she can’t bring herself to complete. Then a redevelopment notice lands on Depot Square, and that same gray morning a buttoned-up grump in the quiet car reports her to the conductor for one whispered phone call. War is declared over a single outlet and a borrowed charger.

But the 7:14 is a small world, and Daniel — terse, precise, secretly tender — thaws one stop at a time. He lends the charger. He fixes her mother’s crooked sign without being asked. He turns out to be the one person who lets Joy stop performing and simply grieve.

What Joy doesn’t know is that the developer razing her block is Daniel’s estranged father — and that Daniel has known since the very first morning, and said nothing.

A sweet, closed-door, grumpy-sunshine romance about grief and the courage to let things change, the cost of silence versus the risk of speaking, and the difference between keeping a thing and keeping it alive. For readers who love small-town warmth, slow-burn tension, found family, and a happily-ever-after earned the hard way.

Climb aboard the 7:14. Window seat, or aisle?