A HYPOTHESIS FOR FALLING: A Scientist, a Small Town, and the One Variable She Never Accounted For
About this ebook
Forty-two variables. Four thousand couples. One model that predicts which marriages last. So when her lab loses its funding, June knows exactly where the proof lives: Maple Hollow, Illinois — nine hundred marriages since 1962, four divorces, and a town that loves the way other towns breathe: quietly, stubbornly, and in defiance of every statistic ever written.
Her plan is simple. Study the town. Publish the proof. Leave.
The plan does not account for Eli Bennett.
Gruff, sawdust-cuffed, and carrying a debt he won't let anyone help him bear, Eli wants no part of June's study — and June wants no part of the way her chest tightens when he fixes her grandmother's porch without being asked, without a word, without a signature. He speaks in eleven words or fewer. Her model gives them a twelve percent match. She keeps the printout.
But Maple Hollow has been waiting for June all her life, and it doesn't study its guests — it adopts them. In casseroles that arrive ahead of grief, a diner that keeps orders for the ones who can't come give them anymore, a porch bench two people keep calling theirs, and a festival stage built of white oak to hold up joy, June is about to learn what this town has known for sixty-four years:
Love is not predicted. It is practiced.
And the one variable she never accounted for is the only one that ever mattered.
Grumpy/sunshine · sweet heat, closed doors, open hearts · a complete standalone with a guaranteed HEA
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About the author
Scarlet Hartwell writes contemporary small-town romance about big feelings, found families, and the people who love you exactly as you are — and then fix the thing you swore wasn't broken.
A Hypothesis for Falling is her debut novel and the first stand-alone story set in Maple Hollow, where the roses are feral, the casseroles are strategic, and nobody minds their own business.
Scarlet believes love is not, in fact, an equation — though she respects anyone brave enough to try the math. She writes from a desk piled with paperbacks and a kettle that is always on, and she is already at work on the next Maple Hollow story.
