
Mature
The Marriage Broke Before Dawn
MC Second Chance Cheating Marriage in CrisisBy Lynda StewartLength8h 30m
About this audiobook
Connie Bujold has kept the small hours for twelve years. She runs the all-night bakery that feeds Culp Ridge before the town wakes — the shift workers, the truckers, the hospital, the early Mass — and she is awake for everyone and held by no one in the dark. So when her marriage finally breaks, it breaks the way everything reaches her: at four in the morning, while she's already up with flour to the wrist. Her husband couldn't even betray her during business hours.
Isaiah "Curfew" Calloway, Sergeant-at-Arms of the Ashen Vow MC, has never been able to lie still. A lifelong insomniac, he ran from every quiet night — onto the club's dark roads, and finally into a booth at the all-night diner with a fellow sleepless soul who didn't know he was married. He didn't have a cold marriage or an unhappy one. He had a good one, and the quiet of it frightened him, so he gave his wakeful, honest, three-in-the-morning self to a stranger and gave his wife a performance and an empty side of the bed.
Connie doesn't beg and she doesn't burn it down. She takes the bakery upmarket into the town's beloved dawn institution, hands off the graveyard shift she'd made a prison, and stops keeping his hours. Isaiah spends a year doing the one thing his whole self was built to run from: being still and useful in the quiet, showing up at 4 a.m. to knead dough, silent and uncredited, at her pace and no faster. And when it counts, he lays the Sergeant-at-Arms patch on the club table with his own hand and gives up the night runs that hid him — not to buy her back, but because a man can't keep the machine he hid inside and call himself changed.
The other woman is no villain here. Lisette was lied to and lonely, and she walks away with her own dignity and her own life. And when Connie finally chooses, she chooses from full hands — the owner of the hour that once broke her, giving it back on her own terms.
The Marriage Broke Before Dawn is a grown-up MC second-chance romance where the pre-dawn hour is the whole geography of the wound and the repair. A real infidelity reckoning, a year of hard, wordless grovel measured in deeds not promises, an other woman written as a human being, a father and a club that have to bend to a baker's dawn — and a hard-won happily-ever-after that begins where it broke: at four in the morning, over the first loaf of the day.
Audiobook details
GenreGeneral Fiction, Romance
Length8 hrs 30 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Content note: this book contains marital infidelity and betr
2Prologue Connie The town thinks the day starts when the sun
3Chapter 1 Isaiah The bed is the enemy. I will say that flat
4Chapter 2 Connie Four in the morning is my hour. I want to s
5Chapter 3 Isaiah I stand in her kitchen while she makes brea
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6Chapter 4 Connie I put him out on a Tuesday, in daylight, wh
7Chapter 5 Isaiah I sleep in the room off the clubhouse where
8Chapter 6 Connie I do not go looking for Lisette Aumont. I w
9Chapter 7 Isaiah Tine finds me on the fourth night sitting o
10Chapter 8 Connie The sign painter comes at ten in the mornin
11Chapter 9 Isaiah Four in the morning is a road I know. I hav
12Chapter 10 Connie He wants a schedule. I can see it in him,
13Chapter 11 Isaiah My father calls a run for Thursday night,
14Chapter 12 Connie Lisette Aumont comes to the bakery in dayl
15Chapter 13 Isaiah Tine tells me there's a run Sunday, and I
16Chapter 14 Connie I decide the terms on an ordinary Tuesday,
17Chapter 15 Isaiah The yard smells like cold oil and cut gras
18Chapter 16 Connie The mother-line comes in the door at ten p
19Chapter 17 Isaiah Tuesday I ride the run and it's clean, fre
20Chapter 18 Connie The letter comes on a Thursday, cream enve
21Chapter 19 Isaiah Church is Sunday night, and I know before
22Chapter 20 Connie I only go to the yard because of Wystan. H
23Chapter 21 Isaiah The yard empties out. Wystan's wife takes
24Chapter 23 Isaiah The clubhouse smells of engine and old smo
25Chapter 24 Connie The way I learn what he did is the way you
26Chapter 25 Isaiah The first thing you notice with no patch o
27Chapter 26 Connie They give us the award on a Saturday, in t
28Chapter 27 Isaiah Four in the morning and Ridgeline is empty
29Chapter 28 Connie I am the one who reopens the door. I want
30Chapter 29 Isaiah I do sleep, some, on the narrow couch in t
31Chapter 30 Connie A year to the hour, and the oven light is
32Chapter 31 Isaiah I used to think a man's whole worth was in
33Chapter 32 Connie We are remaking a life, and we are doing i
34Chapter 33 Isaiah The club calls a run for Friday night and
35Chapter 34 Connie I decide it at the bench, which is the onl
36Epilogue Connie The morning I marry my husband for the secon