“The river remembers what time tries to wash away.”

In the shadow of 1910s Chicago, where expectations run high and secrets run deep, a quiet current carries two souls toward each other.

Nell Whitmore, a young woman bound by duty yet driven by creative longing, finds her only freedom beside the river—a place where dreams take shape in ink and silence. Jamie Calloway, a reserved carpenter with his own quiet burdens, begins work near that same riverbank, never expecting to find something—or someone—that might change everything.

As seasons shift and years pass, their paths tangle and fray under the weight of family, time, and the choices that define us. Framed through fragments of forgotten journals and memories, Mend in the River is a deeply romantic, achingly lyrical novel about love lost and found, the scars we carry, and the places that hold our truths long after we’ve gone.

The river remembers what time tries to wash away.


Long before ink touched paper, before love was spoken into existence, the river bore witness. It knew of stolen glances beneath the dappled sunlight, of whispered promises carried away on the breeze, and of tears that melted into its current. It cradled the weight of laughter and sorrow alike, flowing ever onward even as the lives it touched unraveled and mended again.


This is not merely a story of love or of heartbreak but of the spaces in between, of the moments that shape a life and the choices that carve a future. It is a tale not just of two souls, but of the hands that tried to keep them apart, the sacrifices made in silence, and the wounds that time alone could not heal.


And so, it is here, at the river's edge, that their story begins… and where, in the end, it must return.


Prologue