Marriage Resurrected by Liz Flaherty #LoveStory #SecondChanceRomance

MUSE MONGAY

I love this post by guest, Liz Flaherty, for Muse Monday. A long married life can be quite the inspiration for a book. And having one of  those long marriages, I can relate. Maybe you will too...

We’ve been married for a long time. Make no mistake—I’m glad for that. I still love the guy who sits in the other recliner and can’t imagine a day without him in it. But there are days…oh, yes, there are days. I thought that after the kids were raised, things would be easier. And they were. And then I thought when we retired, life together would be such a piece of cake…so easy. We’d spend all our time together and cultivate mutual interests and we’d travel and…

What was I thinking?

No, it’s not particularly easy, but I love every day of our lives together. We’ve been lucky…yes, and worked hard…so that we’ve never separated from each other. While we’ve had both loud times and silent ones, we’ve been in the same place. We held onto the idea that the next day would be better. Sometimes it took more than one, and we were okay with that, too.

But not everyone makes it all the way through the loud and silent times.

In A Soft Place to Fall, Early and Nash were married for a long time, too. She got pregnant while she was still in high school and they got married when she was 16 and he was 18. They both worked nearly all the time and got Nash through medical school and raised four children. Thirty years after they got married, they’re living in a pretty gated community in Lexington, Kentucky, enjoying grandbabies and freedom from debt and…

And maybe not enjoying anything at all. At least, Nash isn’t.

Divorced and in search of herself, Early moves back to the Ridge in rural Kentucky. She takes care of Nash’s father after he has heart surgery, of her mother when she breaks her ankle, and…finally…of herself, too. As she builds a quilt shop named A Soft Place to Fall, she also creates a life for herself.

But then there’s Nash.

A Soft Place to Fall was first released in 2013. Nine years later, with a few changes, it still feels relevant—even more so to me now because I know just how hard it can be to rebuild from the ground up. I hope you find grace and its path in the story, too.

Blurb: Early McGrath doesn't want freedom from her thirty-year marriage to Nash, but when it's forced upon her, she does the only thing she knows to do - she goes home to the Ridge to reinvent herself.

Only what is someone who's spent her life taking care of other people supposed to do when no one needs her anymore? Even as the threads of her life unravel, she finds new ones - reconnecting with the church of her childhood, building the quilt shop that has been a long-time dream, and forging a new friendship with her former husband.

The definition of freedom changes when it's combined with faith, and through it all perhaps Early and Nash can find a Soft Place to Fall.

Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/3yexr8jz

D2D: https://books2read.com/u/bW57yx

Excerpt—just a snippet!

He set down the remote control and pushed himself to his feet. Early walked every day no matter where she was. She used to ask him to go with her, but he’d usually found reasons not to. After his angioplasty, she forced the issue and he went along, treading Canterbury Crossing’s pseudo-cobblestones for the prescribed time. He’d responded to her attempts at conversation in monosyllables until she gave up and they did their three miles in a heavy silence that seemed to seep into and take over the rest of their marriage. Sometimes he’d noticed her lips moving and knew she was praying.

He wished he’d have prayed with her, but he hadn’t. He wished he’d talked to her more, but he hadn’t.

He wished a lot of things.

Bio: USA Today bestselling author Liz Flaherty started writing in the fourth grade when her Aunt Gladys allowed her to use her portable Royal typewriter. The truth was that her aunt would have let her do anything to get her out of her hair, but the typewriter and the stories it could produce caught on, and Liz never again had a day without a what if… in it.

She and Duane, her husband of at least forever, live in a farmhouse in central Indiana, sharing grown children, spoiled cats, and their grandkids, the Magnificent Seven. (Don’t get her started on them—you’ll be here all day.) To find out more about her, stop by http://lizflaherty.net/ or any of the other places she hangs out by visiting linktr.ee/LizFlaherty.