Cider Season

Stella Whittle writes about home for a living and hasn't set foot in hers for eight years. With a stalled cookbook and a publisher demanding honesty, she returns to Colton Ridge, California, where her grandmother's fig tree still shades the yard and her sister is planning an October wedding without her. The only story worth telling belongs to Luke Thatcher, a guarded orchardist who refuses to be anyone's material—until she offers to earn it, one apple at a time.