If It Makes You Happy

Newly divorced and recently bereaved, advertising executive Michelle Cadell arrives in Copper Run, Vermont in the fall of 1997 to run her late mother's bed-and-breakfast for three months before her sister takes it over. She plans to keep her head down and her return ticket to Seattle close at hand.

That plan wavers the moment her next-door neighbor Cliff Burke starts turning up — a warm, steady single father who owns the town bakery and is raising two young daughters, Emily and Brittany, on his own. As Michelle settles into a small-town rhythm she never expected to want, her friendship with Cliff deepens into something neither of them planned for, even as her career and her grief pull her back toward the life she thought she'd already chosen.

Told in alternating chapters from Michelle and Cliff's points of view, If It Makes You Happy is a slow-burn, cozy contemporary romance about grief, found family, and the quiet courage of staying somewhere unfamiliar long enough to call it home.