Free · A Lost & Found prequel novella
The Keeper of Thimbles and Thread
Forty years before Isolde walked up the hill, the bell rang for someone else.
Halligan has spent twenty-two years as the second pair of hands in another keeper’s shop. Now a letter from the Road has sent him to Ashthorn, a wet fishing village at the end of everything, to keep the Lost and Found. Enid Pryor keeps the draper’s next door. She has held the shop’s key for five months against exactly this: a stranger with a bag and a story.
She has not felt the warmth of a fire in two winters. Not cold; she could do something about cold. She simply cannot feel one. The whole village has noticed. She has told nobody. He sees it on her in the first minute on the step, and by the rule his craft keeps above every other, he cannot say so, or reach for it, until she asks.
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A note on what is inside
This is a short book about grief, and what a person will pay to be warm again. It contains a mother’s death in fever two winters earlier, told in recollection and never staged; a father’s earlier death, mentioned; and a woman who, having lost the feeling of warmth, holds her hand on a hot range to learn whether she can feel it, and burns it.
No violence. Clean: one kiss, late, in the rain. The romance is complete and ends happily at chapter twenty. Chapter twenty-one stands apart from it: forty years on, an old man alone in a house, and the door into Book One.
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