Mature
He Had to Love Her in Ruins
Second Chance At Love After Betrayal And CheatingBy Lynda Stewart
Length8h 55m
About this audiobook
Heidi Brennan can taste a fault in an olive oil before anyone else in the Vale knows it's there. For twenty years she's stood at the blending bench of the Ellery mill and turned a hard hillside's fruit into the one fine thing it was capable of becoming. What she can't taste, until it's poured out in front of her on an October morning, are the two ruins in her own marriage — the debt her husband buried, and the woman he told about it.
Tom Ellery didn't have a cold marriage. He had a good one, and he still hid the failing books from his own wife for years while handing the truth — the fear, the shame, the whole real weight of it — to a buyer named Josephine. He gave the honesty to the stranger and the performance to Heidi. When it all comes out at once — the foreclosure notices and the affair, side by side on his desk — he doesn't get to explain. There is nothing to explain. He was a coward about money and dressed it up as everything else.
Heidi doesn't beg and she doesn't burn it down. She's a maker; she takes the one thing that was always hers — her palate, her blends, her name — and builds the mill into something that can survive without him, until she's the one standing at the front of the room instead of the one clapped for from the back. Tom spends a year proving change in the only language he has left that he can't fake: unpaid, uncredited work, the debts disclosed one hard conversation at a time, and finally a sacrifice that costs him everything and asks her for nothing — a thing he means to keep secret, and that she uncovers herself.
The other woman is never the villain here. Josephine was lied to with half-truths too, and she walks away with her own conscience and her own dignity. And when Heidi finally chooses, she chooses from full hands — the sole owner of the mill, standing up, because she wants to and not because she needs to.
He Had to Love Her in Ruins is a grown-up second-chance marriage romance about betrayal, financial ruin, and the slow, witnessed, deed-by-deed grovel it actually takes to earn a way back. A real reckoning at the heroine's pace, an other woman written as a human being, a burnt grove that only bears again years later — and a hard-won happily-ever-after for a woman who spent her life making everyone else's ruin into something worth keeping, and finally does it for herself.
Audiobook details
GenreGeneral Fiction, Romance
Length8 hrs 55 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Content note: this book contains marital infidelity and betr
2Prologue Heidi The first oil of the year comes off the press
3Chapter 1 Tom The number at the bottom of the second page is
4Chapter 2 Heidi The way I find out is the way I find out eve
5Chapter 3 Tom I know the second I come through the kitchen d
Show all chaptersShow less
6Chapter 4 Heidi Noor comes home Sunday because it's a Sunday
7Chapter 5 Tom The bank sets the meeting for a Tuesday, and I
8Chapter 6 Heidi Josephine Kettridge asks to meet me in a cof
9Chapter 7 Tom The truth I've been avoiding arrives all at on
10Chapter 8 Heidi The tasting bench is the one place in the wo
11Chapter 9 Tom The dead trees don't care that I'm sorry. That
12Chapter 11 Tom Rafe waits until I've had three weeks of the
13Chapter 12 Heidi Josephine Kettridge asks to meet me, and I
14Chapter 13 Tom Winter comes into the grove and I learn the t
15Chapter 14 Heidi Halvard doesn't just take the order. He put
16Chapter 15 Tom She gives me forty minutes. Not out of mercy.
17Chapter 16 Heidi I don't sleep after the forty minutes. I li
18Chapter 17 Tom The thing about erasing yourself is that you
19Chapter 18 Heidi The Carraway offer comes on good stationery
20Chapter 19 Tom I tell them all at once because doing it in p
21Chapter 20 Heidi Josephine Kettridge closes her Carraway acc
22Chapter 21 Tom Nadel has the whole structure built by the la
23Chapter 22 Heidi The papers come to the tasting bench becaus
24Chapter 23 Tom The lawyer's office in Carraway smells like n
25Chapter 24 Heidi It closes on a Friday, and the strangest pa
26Chapter 25 Tom Monday I show up at the press at six, and Gid
27Chapter 26 Heidi Yolanda drives me to Carraway for the award
28Chapter 27 Heidi I choose the night. It matters to me that I
29Chapter 28 Tom I go down before Gideon starts the press, the
30Chapter 29 Heidi I find out the way you find out true things
31Chapter 30 Heidi The mill smells the way it only smells one
32Chapter 31 Tom The trick to setting a young olive is that yo
33Chapter 32 Heidi The Carraway buyers come to the mill now in
34Chapter 33 Tom Winter in the grove is the honest season. Not
35Chapter 34 Heidi Spring comes up the valley the way it alway
36Epilogue Heidi Four autumns on, the south grove bears. I wal
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