A widowed Texan operator who has been giving good mornings to a woman at a Hagerstown coffee counter for nine months learns her name on the day she walks into his office with her dead husband's envelope and the address of a stringer who has not filed in eleven days.
Silas "Si" Halloran is fifty-two, six years a widower, and the quartermaster of the newly independent Sentinel Group. He has been buying coffee from the same Anvil counter at six fourteen every Saturday since the morning after his sixth widowhood anniversary went by without him noticing. The woman who pours it has been a face he could find in the dark. He has not asked her name. He is not the kind of man who has, in nine months, decided he is allowed to want to know.
Hannah Bloom is forty-eight, a pharmacist, the widow of Si's old commanding officer Tom, and the unofficial doctor of a Saturday community clinic in the basement of First Methodist of Hagerstown. Tom left her one envelope before the aneurysm took him at his desk. Cold things keep, he told her. Don't open it unless Eli is in trouble. Eli, twenty-four, an AP stringer covering refugees fleeing the breakaway coastal region of a country the State Department will not name, has not filed in eleven days.
When Hannah walks into the Sentinel office holding the envelope, Si reads his own name on the paper and learns three things at once: who she was, what her late husband owed him, and that he has been falling in love with her for nine months without knowing she existed. Tom Bloom paid in advance for a rescue. Si will not take the money. He will take the boy.
What follows is a rescue across Hagerstown and a fictional Black Sea republic, an Orthodox parish network sheltering a wounded boy and the widow he refuses to leave behind, a bridge across a creek in northern Türkiye where a Texas Ranger finally signs his name to a thirteen-year-old apology, and the slow Methodist work of two widowed people learning how to be married to a living person again.
Faith carries the book. Coffee carries the morning. And the Methodist basement is the room where both of them have to learn how to be married to a living person again.
A faith-forward, sweet-and-clean Christian military romance, slow-burn and later-in-life, with a Pentecost wedding, a percolator on a kitchen at six fourteen am, a dogwood Tom planted in 1995, and two chains carrying two dead spouses into a kitchen with two living people.
Book Two of The Sentinel Series. The team from Extraction Protocol returns. The chain of small named strangers from Eldoret returns. A new chain in a country no one will name walks back into the room.
For readers of Lynn H. Blackburn, Susan May Warren, Becky Wade, and Lynette Eason.
