Pine Hollow Stories

Before the eleven children. Before Pine Hollow knew their names. There was just a boy with flour on his hands and a girl with a clarinet case, and thirty years still ahead of them. Jake Peterson was the best quarterback Pine Hollow had ever seen. He was also, quietly and without apology, the boy who baked. He had his grandmother's recipe card, a job at Hansen's Bakery on Main Street, and absolutely no idea what to say when Kali Smith looked at him from across the hallway. Kali Smith was smart and steady and going somewhere, even if she hadn't decided where yet. She noticed Jake before he noticed her noticing, and she waited, the way she waited for most things, with patience and her whole attention. What followed was thirty years of a life built from the inside out. A plastic ring from a jar of cake toppers. A real one on an overlook above the lights of a small town. A bakery they made their own. A house on Birch Street that grew with them. Eleven children who arrived by different roads and became, without anyone planning it, simply theirs. And then, on an ordinary Tuesday in October, a diagnosis that divided everything into before and after. Pine Hollow Stories is the prequel to the Pine Hollow series — a love story told in two timelines, moving between the sweetness of a first beginning and the quiet courage of two people who built something worth fighting for, and are still fighting. Clean small town romance. A love that lasts. A town that shows up. Welcome to Pine Hollow.