The Mendoza Line

Dr. Elizabeth Brooks, PhD, once thought she’d have her life together by the time she was thirty-six. Yet here she is, newly dumped in the most public and painful of ways, stuck back in her tiny backwoods hometown with her once-promising academic career placed on an indefinite hold as she cares for her bereaved yet overbearing mother.

Enter Jake Cole, the new coach of the university’s baseball team and her high school nemesis whom she still blames for a particularly humiliating prom night twenty years ago. Jake is eager to make amends for his past transgressions, and as reluctant as Elizabeth is to admit it, his suggestion that they fake-date in the interest of helping her save face in front of her colleagues who are buzzing with gossip over her fiancé’s infidelity with a former student isn’t without merit. Yet as the months pass, despite her resolution to remain aloof and emotionally unattached, Elizabeth begins to realize that the boy she remembers as good-for-nothing himbo has matured into exactly the kind of man for which she has spent most of her life looking.

But Jake has his own reasons for their charade, ones that he has deliberately kept hidden, and when the truth comes out, Elizabeth is left wondering whether there was anything real about the fake relationship that has brought the joy back into her tumbled-down life.