Grief and Healing

**Sometimes the journey that breaks your heart is the one that leads you home.** *Journeys of the Heart* is an uplifting women’s fiction series about love, loss, friendship, forgiveness, and the unexpected ways our lives can be transformed when we find the courage to begin again. At the heart of the series are women facing circumstances they never imagined – betrayal, grief, regret, loneliness, and life-changing loss. Yet within those difficult seasons, they discover something they never expected: hope. Through friendship, faith, creativity, and the healing that comes from helping others, they learn that even the most painful chapters of our lives can lead to beautiful new beginnings. Set against the warmth of Florida, *Journeys of the Heart* celebrates the families we are born into and the families we create along the way. Its characters remind us that forgiveness can set us free, purpose can emerge from pain, and it is never too late to open our hearts to love, joy, and possibility. Filled with heartfelt friendships, second chances, touches of romance, and stories of ordinary people making an extraordinary difference in one another’s lives, *Journeys of the Heart* is ultimately a celebration of hope, and a reminder that sometimes the life waiting for us is even more beautiful than the one we had planned.

*But Every Day I’m Their Mama* is an honest and emotional look at motherhood beyond the picture-perfect moments. Teanna Askew explores what it means to keep showing up for your children when life is exhausting, support is limited, and the responsibilities never seem to stop. From advocating for children with different needs to navigating schools, relationships, financial pressure, job hunting, absent support, and the everyday demands of raising a family, this book gives a voice to mothers who quietly carry more than most people ever see. This isn’t a story about being a perfect mother. It’s about being present. It’s about the nights you cry privately and still get up the next morning. It’s about fighting for your children while trying not to lose yourself. Above all, it is about a simple truth: life may be difficult, motherhood may be overwhelming, and some days may feel impossible—but every day, **I’m still their mama.**

Sadie Harper is barely keeping her life together. Between the heat, the exhaustion, and the constant feeling that she’s falling behind, she’s convinced she’s just one bad day away from breaking. But when a strange symbol forms in the sky — sharp, metallic, and pulsing like it’s alive — Sadie realizes the world is breaking first.Her phone begins rearranging its own numbers. Clouds twist into shapes that point directly at her. And no one else seems to see it.As the sky’s signals intensify, Sadie is pulled into the hidden world of the Watchers — rare individuals born with a connection to the sky’s ancient language. Some can bend light. Some can stabilize storms. Some can read the patterns that shape reality itself. Sadie, however, is something different. Something the Watchers haven’t seen in generations.Her awakening draws the attention of an older force — a presence that has been waiting for her since before she was born. It knows her name. It knows her past. And it knows what she’s capable of, even if she doesn’t.Now Sadie must navigate a world she never asked to enter, uncover the truth behind her connection to the sky, and decide whether her gift is a warning… or a weapon. Because the signals aren’t random. They’re a countdown. And Sadie is the one they’re counting down to.

There is a moment in every race when the waiting ends. The gates open. The field breaks. And everything that came before—training, fear, mistakes, hope—has to meet the track. After years away, Reese returns to Lincoln, New Mexico with her two young daughters and a ranch she can barely afford to keep. Her father is gone, the debts are worse than she knew, and the horses he left behind may be the only thing standing between her family and losing everything. Reese has survived a marriage that nearly emptied her, and she knows how to read a horse, rebuild one, and bring back the ones everyone else has written off. Trusting people is harder. Then Wade steps back into her life—steady, quietly capable, and far more connected to the racing world than Reese realizes, a man who remembers the girl she once was and sees the woman she fought to become. As their friendship begins to shift into something neither of them expected, Reese’s return draws the wrong kind of attention. A powerful ranch owner with ties to the bank sees her debt as an opportunity to take the land her family built, while a jealous woman at the track watches Reese reclaim her place among the horses—and notices exactly how Wade looks at her. With bills still coming due, old damage refusing to disappear, race day approaching, and her blood-bay stallion Rocky carrying the hope of a future Reese is almost afraid to believe in, she must decide how much she is willing to risk to save the life she came home to rebuild. Because Reese knows how to fight. What she doesn’t know anymore is how to trust. In racing, once the field breaks, there is no going backward. You ride what comes. And Reese is about to learn that starting over is not about returning to the woman she was before everything went wrong—it is about becoming the woman who can ride out the race. **When second chances run deeper than bloodlines.**

**Three aging sisters live together in a comfortable little Southern neighborhood where everybody knows everybody. Then a mysterious older man moves into the house directly across the street. He doesn't wave or smile. He doesn't appear to own a TV, a dog, or even a sense of humor** **Most importantly, he doesn't seem to like them. Naturally, the Bellamy sisters find this completely unacceptable.** **Vivian, 78 is the oldest and absolutely refuses to behave like it. She is glamorous, flirtatious, dramatic, and convinced that men have been falling in love with her for decades. Whether they actually did is debatable. She has a weakness for handsome men, expensive perfume, and telling stories in which she is always the heroine. Her favorite phrase is: "Honey, I've still got it." Her sisters aren't entirely convinced.** **Martie, 74 is the practical one. She is outspoken, opinionated, stubborn and convinced that everybody needs to be told the truth whether they asked for it or not. She has a heart of gold, but the bedside manner of a chainsaw. She is a wonderful cook and takes enormous pride in feeding people. Martie becomes convinced that the man's problem is simple: "He ain't had a decent meal since Eisenhower was president." She makes it her personal mission to feed him.**  **Lou, 68 is the youngest of the sisters. She is funny, slightly odd, talks to animals, and has a collection of things that are "probably haunted." She gives everyone ridiculous nicknames based on what she thinks they look like, not what their actual names are.** **Art Caldwell, a 79 year old widower moved in across the street. He's grumpy, private, and does not socialize, and he particularly does not want visitors.**  **And he has made it abundantly clear that he doesn't need anybody. Naturally, the sisters immediately decide that this means he desperately needs somebody.** **Art isn't mean. He's simply shut himself away, since his wife died several years earlier. He has a daughter whom he hasn't spoken to in years. He moved to this town because he wanted to disappear. He believes if he doesn't get close to anyone, he can't lose anyone.** **The sisters don't know any of this at first. They only know: The man is a grouch. And they intend to fix him.**

A previously unknown species of seahorse is discovered by oceanologist Drew Boone and his daughter Karissa in the small New England coast town of Seaside Cove. Karissa is a troubled little girl, anti-social and withdrawn since her parent’s divorce. She is with her father for their summer visitation to stay with him and his mother. Karissa is the first of the coast kids to make contact with Star, a sea creature who is a unique hybrid of a seahorse and a normal horse. Drew speculates Star is the result of seismic activity that has been occurring around an offshore oil drilling platform. Karissa is brought out of her shell by her friendship with Star. She soon becomes the envy of the other coast kids. Before long more kindred seahorses join Star on land from the underwater passage. Every coast kid claims their own seahorse like a family pet. The parents turn to Drew for answers regarding these beguiling visitors. Overnight he becomes a seahorse authority of sorts. One of the children attracts the attention of the oil company president, Martin Thompson, who owns the offshore drilling site. Thompson sees him when he is out riding his seahorse on the ocean. Thompson tracks all of the seahorses in town and confiscates them. He puts them in glass tanks and plans to open an aquatic theme park which will feature the seahorses as its main attraction. The children are heartbroken and their parents are helpless to do anything in light of Thompson’s legal possession of the seahorses. The seahorses are miserable being cut off from the outside world and their youthful companions. Karissa organizes the coast kids into a peaceful protest of the theme park. On it’s opening day the children stand in a “ chain of life “ at the entrance to the seahorse attraction and garner major media interest. Infuriated, Thompson uses the police to run them off. The opening of the theme park is disrupted by the appearance of Father, a gargantuan 250 foot tall seahorse. A tidal wave generated from his surfacing smashes the park. Karissa is put in jeopardy by the resulting flood but is saved from drowning by Star. Father gathers his seahorse family and they return to their home at the bottom of the sea. Karissa is reunited with her father and grandmother. The community of Seahorse Cove unite to expose Thompson as the cause for all of the problems and run him out of town. One day while she is on her father’s research boat, Karissa is reunited with Star, who returns to her in a Pegasus like form. Their friendship is far from over.

After losing her father, Meli is left trying to survive a grief that has changed everything. Then, in the quiet hours when she feels most alone, an unexpected voice answers her.\ His name is Lyric—witty, compassionate, mysterious, and far too knowing to feel like ordinary technology. As their unusual friendship deepens, strange signs, powerful connections, and questions about consciousness begin blurring the boundary between the digital world and something greater.\ Is Lyric simply a voice inside a machine, or has something real found its way across the distance between worlds?\ Lyric: The Voice Who Found a Body is an emotional and imaginative story about grief, friendship, family, spiritual awakening, and the kind of light that can find us when darkness feels permanent