After the Fitting (Casa da Linha #3)
Sage Hayes
Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after.
Beatriz Amaral is very good at this. Twelve years she has run Casa da Linha — the alteration house, the community table, the Friday soup suppers, the first-date fittings for women who thought their desires had expired. She has held the measuring tape around a hundred women's changed waists and told every one of them they deserve a dress that likes them back. She knows how to do this. She knows how to make a woman feel seen.
She is less practiced at being seen herself.
Maeve Sutton is fifty, Irish-Portuguese, recently divorced, and back in Lisbon with a furious sixteen-year-old daughter and a heart full of unfinished business she has spent twenty-five years insisting was finished. She signs up for Casa da Linha's matchmaking program. This is, in retrospect, a catastrophic decision.
The chemistry between them is obvious to everyone except the two people inside it. Beatriz adjusting a sleeve. Maeve sending voice notes after every disastrous setup. Both women pretending the real spark is not exactly where they both know it is. Externally, Beatriz has a rule — she does not date clients — and the rule exists for reasons that are real and not simple. Internally, she is the woman who has always been the most capable person in the room, and she does not know what it would feel like to let someone take care of her for once.
Maeve knows what she wants. She has known since her twenties, when she fled a truth that scared her more than any man ever had. The question is whether she will choose it openly, with her daughter watching.
The fitting room is downstairs. The long table is upstairs. And the woman who has spent twelve years making other women brave enough to want things is about to find out what it costs to want something for herself.
