Third Places Lost (Cost of Authenticity Book 1)

Sarah Morrison has spent thirty years performing her life for an audience she can’t escape. Award-winning actress. Carefully managed public figure. A woman so skilled at appearing fine that she forgot what fine actually felt like. When her daughter calls from a college town in North Carolina — struggling, reaching, asking her to come — Sarah doesn’t fly. She drives. Two thousand miles of American road with her husband beside her and a phone she’s been carrying out of habit, the way you carry a stone you picked up miles back without knowing why. The desert strips everything down. A rattlesnake does the rest. What she finds is Margaret’s Bookstore — forty-two years of worn floors, mismatched chairs, and a community that built itself in rooms where nobody was tracking it.