Second Round

For eleven years, Grace Halvorsen has read every couple who walks into The Sugar House like an open book, split desserts, careful eye contact, the fourteen seconds it takes her to know exactly how a love story ends. She's never once been wrong.

She's also never once turned the same unflinching gaze on herself. Not until a food truck parks across Fifth Street, run by a man with a stenciled name, six unshakable menu items, and the infuriating ability to ask the one question no customer ever has: why.

What starts as a spite-fueled sign war curdles into forced partnership, then curdles again, deliciously, into something neither of them ordered. But Grace has spent a decade turning self-protection into a professional skill, and the truck's owner has his own history of going quiet exactly when it matters most. When an old wound and an new secret collide on the front page of the local paper, Grace has to decide whether the thing she's built her whole life on, reading everyone but herself, was ever really a gift, or just the safest place left to stand.

Warm, wickedly funny, and studded with the best baked goods this side of Fifth Street, Second Round is a love story about two people who finally stop diagnosing each other's hearts long enough to say the truth out loud, and the whole town that shows up, casseroles and betting ledgers in hand, to make sure they do.

If you've ever fallen for the person you swore you'd never let close, this is your book.