Between the Flags (The Tidemark Trilogy #2)
Sage Hayes
Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after.
Petra Dawes is fifty-six years old and has spent eleven years watching people destroy each other in family court in the name of love. She has drawn her own conclusions. She swims with the Dawn Sirens because Miriam will not stop asking, and because the sea, at least, does not argue with her. She has not planned for Leila Costa.
Leila is forty-five, broad-shouldered and warmly charismatic, a former professional footballer now running community sports programs on the Northern Beaches. She is also in the middle of a bruising divorce, co-parenting twin sixteen-year-olds who schedule their emotional crises without regard for anyone's calendar, and managing a shared custody arrangement with an ex-wife who appears at every school event. Leila is not looking for a relationship. She is barely managing the one she already has with her own life. She arrives at the Dawn Sirens' winter relay as a favour and ends up next to Petra in the water. That is where the trouble starts.
Both women are out. Neither is confused about what the pull between them means. The problem is that Leila's life — the noise, the teenagers, the ex-wife, the permanent, unpredictable domestic present — is exactly what Petra has spent years constructing her own life to exclude. And Leila has been deferring her own needs for sixteen years, postponing desire until everyone else is settled, which means she has been postponing it since she can remember.
Petra has always chosen the clean version of things. Leila is offering the actual version.
Is order really the same thing as wisdom?
