Bolt by Bolt

Amara Cheney doesn't need saving. She built that lesson into the walls of Cheney Auto Repair one bolt at a time, the same way she rebuilt herself after the husband who drained her accounts and vanished, no help, no shortcuts, and no one she has to trust but herself.

Then a black F-150 rolls too fast into her gravel lot, and the man who climbs out turns out to be exactly the kind of trouble she swore she was done with: charming, evasive, and hiding something. She just doesn't know yet that it's four kids, four ex-wives, and more money than her whole shop is worth.

Marcus Okafor isn't used to being wanted for the right reasons. He's used to being wanted for the wrong ones, and it's cost him every marriage he's ever had. So when a sharp-tongued mechanic with grease under her nails, and a stray dog who trusts him faster than she does, starts to feel like someone worth being honest for, he has one chance to get the truth right before it costs him her too.

Between a foul-mouthed parrot who won't stop narrating their business, a rival shop willing to poison the creek behind town to win a contract, and a family that's about to get a lot bigger, Amara and Marcus are both going to learn the same hard lesson: some things don't come back together whole. They come back together bolt by bolt, and only if somebody stays for the whole job.

A small-town, closed-door romance about the families we're given, the ones we build anyway, and the terrifying, worthwhile work of letting someone else hold the wrench.

About the Author

Felix N.BBA.MA.QA'rb. writes fiction that treats ordinary communities as the site of extraordinary moral weight - small towns and mid-sized cities where a single formula, a single silence, or a single inherited decision turns out to carry the whole history of who a place has chosen to protect and who it has chosen to let go quiet.

Felix's work returns often to the same conviction: that injustice rarely announces itself as villainy. It arrives instead as policy, as process, as the reasonable-sounding choice a frightened, well-intentioned person makes under pressure - and that fiction's job is to make that choice visible again, long after the institutions built on top of it have learned to call it normal.

Felix lives close enough to water to never quite stop thinking about what it remembers.