Finding Ground – Chapter 1 (Free Preview)

A Fall Festival novella set in Maple Ridge

A crisp-air second chance collides with pumpkin-spice chaos at Maple Ridge’s Fall Festival.

Clara Martinez had been driving for three days when she saw the marigolds.

Not real ones—it was late October, and the first hard frost had claimed most of the flowers weeks ago. These were painted marigolds, bright as summer sunshine on a vintage seed packet displayed in the window of Marigold Antiques, framed like the precious thing it probably wasn’t.

She pulled her Honda to the curb without thinking, the way you might reach for a ringing phone in the middle of the night. The logical part of her mind suggested she keep driving. She’d been heading nowhere in particular since leaving home, just away from the ranch house where her husband celebrated her clean cancer screening by immediately returning to SportsCenter, as if her health scare had been an inconvenient commercial break in his regularly scheduled programming.

But something about this town felt familiar. The way the late afternoon light caught the courthouse clock tower, the smell of woodsmoke and dying leaves, the corn-stalk-tied lamp posts and pumpkins that looked grown in someone’s garden.

Inside the antique shop, a silver-haired woman nodded toward the window. “The gentleman from the garden center brought it by. Said someone might appreciate the history.”

“The seed packet in the window,” Clara said. “It’s beautiful.”

“Victory Garden Marigolds — 1943,” the packet declared in cheerful red letters. Impossible orange and yellow blooms promised beauty even in wartime—hope planted in uncertain soil.

“Hank,” the woman added. “Greenway Garden Supply on Elm. He collects things with stories.”

Clara left without buying anything, lavender and old wood clinging to her clothes, the woman’s parting words following her out: When you’re not sure what you want, you’re finally ready to find out what you need.