Restoration Summer

By Kimberly Kirkland Absher

Description:

She knows how to restore houses.
He’s the only one who’s ever made her want to restore her heart.

Vivian Mills knows how to restore anything except the life she lost.

Once the face of a hit design show, Vivian built her career transforming broken spaces into something beautiful. But behind the success was a life quietly unraveling: a marriage that ended in betrayal, a future that slipped out of reach, and a loss she’s never been able to put into words.

Now, a high-profile renovation in the Hamptons is her chance to start over. Keep things simple. Keep things controlled. And above all… don’t get attached.

Until Ethan Cross.

They met once before, in a place meant for people learning how to live with what they couldn’t fix. Back then, keeping her distance was easy. Now, working side by side on a house that feels a little too much like her own heart, it’s anything but.

Ethan is steady in all the ways she isn’t. Patient. Unshaken. The kind of man who sees straight through her defenses and stays anyway. He doesn’t rush her. Doesn’t try to fix what’s broken. But somehow, he makes her want things she swore she’d buried for good.

As the summer unfolds and the house begins to come back to life, so does something inside Vivian she’s spent years trying to silence. But opening her heart again means facing the truth about everything she’s lost. And risking a kind of love she’s not sure she can survive twice.

Because the hardest thing she’ll ever have to rebuild…
is the part of herself that still dares to want him.

Restoration Summer is a deeply emotional story about grief, second chances, and the quiet, powerful way love asks us to be brave again.

If you like NO SPICE, clean stories that are deeply layered, cinematic, and swoony, you're in the right place.

Grumpy-Sunshine | Later in Life | Slow Burn | Friends to More | Military Hero |Celebrity Heroine | Beach Setting | Found Family |Friendship Romance | Divorce Romance | No Spice Romance
*PLEASE NOTE: Vivian's grief is over the loss of a child.*

Book Takeaway:

Learning that even after deep loss, healing is possible and love is worth risking again.

Why the author wrote this book:

Vivian and Ethan were first sketched out in my Laurel Springs novella series, but their story didn’t fit. The more I tried to shape it, the more it became clear they needed something deeper and more layered. That’s when I knew they belonged in the Seasons of the Heart series.

While drafting When Spring Blooms, I found the right place to introduce them. Vivian is a guarded, deeply layered character, and Ethan is the kind of steady, patient man who doesn’t walk away when things get hard.

Ethan’s military background led me to the U.S. Navy, inspired in part by the Korean War stories my dad shared with me growing up. That connection became even more meaningful when I wove in the discovery of love letters between his aunt and uncle written aboard the USS Twining, the same ship my dad served on during the war.

As Vivian’s story unfolded, I realized her guarded heart had to come from a place of deep loss. From there, Restoration Summer took shape as a story about grief, healing, and the courage to love again.