Common Ground at Mercy General

She is the ground the whole town stands on. Nobody ever thought to ask who holds her up.
For sixteen years, Linda Okafor has run Mercy General the way you run a thing you love and cannot say so out loud. She knows every sound the building makes at night, every dollar the county quietly forgives, every donor's name on every brass plate. When Mercy went independent last spring, it cost the little hospital its clean, unmortgaged bones. Now there's a note on the building and a slow bleed she can't stop, and the board wants a stranger in her books.
The stranger is Gabe Navarro. Rumpled, too loud for a Cedar Falls quiet, a rural-hospital turnaround man who has saved forty small buildings over twenty years and built nothing of his own to show for it. He fills silences. He leaves his files in stacks. He is the exact opposite of every consultant they have ever sent, and he is the first person in sixteen years Linda cannot manage.
Then Gabe sees it before anyone else does: the note on Mercy's building has changed hands to a shell company, the clinics that feed the hospital patients are being quietly bought up, and there is no offer to fight, no villain in the room, just a patient man in a good suit and a number on a page. It is the quietest way there is to take a hospital. And to stop it, Linda will have to do the one thing she has organized her whole life around never doing. She will have to let someone carry the weight with her.
Some walls you build to keep the grief out. Some you build so late that you forget you were ever allowed a life.
Common Ground at Mercy General is a slow-burn, closed-door over-40 romance about a woman who holds everyone up learning to lean, a man who always leaves learning to stay, and a town that would rather buy back its own hospital's debt than lose the woman who runs it. Fourth in the Mercy General Series, and a complete story with a hard-won happy ending.
The Mercy General Series - small-town love stories for grown-ups who know better and fall anyway.