Lorri Oliver built Amorous from scratch at sixty — a restaurant on a Connecticut Main Street with a back-bar full of jazz records and a red leather booth she didn’t yet know what to do with.
Then a man from 1981 found her on Classmates.com, drove forty miles through a November snowstorm, and arrived at the host stand holding a burgundy yearbook against his chest like something precious.
They spent ninety minutes in that booth. They kissed between pages. His hand rested on her chest, above everything, and she felt her own heartbeat underneath his palm.
She drove home to Middlebury in the snow. She went to bed. She woke up the next morning and thought one word.
More.
Not more of him. More of this. More of being alive in her body. More of discovering that the woman she’d become had not, in fact, stopped wanting to be touched.
The Yearbook is where it begins.
Wayne Xavier has driven a 1960 Chevrolet Impala since junior year of high school. Fire engine red. Red leather interior. He kept it because some things, once you have them, you don’t let go of.
Lorri Oliver is starting to understand exactly what he means.
They were seventeen together once — briefly, inconclusively, the way seventeen always is. Forty-four years later he walks into a car show in October with the Impala and the same quiet steadiness she remembered, and Lorri finds herself doing the math she swore she wasn’t going to do.
He is not the electrician. He is something else entirely — a craftsman, unhurried, the kind of man who asks may I before the first button and means it as a serious question.
The Impala is the second book in the Something in the Water series. A do-over. A drive-in. A booth with the blinds drawn.
Some things are better the second time.
Wayne Xavier calls from Stamford on a Tuesday in June. He’s coming to Thornbury for the weekend. He has the Impala, a reservation at a new inn on Main Street, and the particular confidence of a man who has driven this road before and intends to drive it again.
Lorri Oliver has a restaurant to run, a town that is starting to notice her, and a red leather booth that Wayne knows better than to take for granted.
She also has a question she cannot yet answer — the kind that arrives quietly, without announcing itself, and sits down at the bar and waits.
Wayne is the third book in the Something in the Water series. A Ferris wheel in June. A bra that is a destination. A fork on the table that nobody has picked up yet.
And at the bar on a Tuesday in October, a man from Ridgefield who drove an hour without being asked and didn’t need to ask for her.
The Something in the Water series just got complicated..