She has kept everyone else's list for six years. She forgot to put her own name on it.

Lucia Salvatore is the daughter every family has and pretends not to. She answers her phone on the first ring. She arrives early. She stays late. She knows which parent needs their heart pill and which sister needs hand cream, and she has not, in longer than she can remember, asked herself what she needs.

Then a dead uncle leaves her a cottage on a lake, and a quiet attorney across a Monday-morning desk looks at her the way no one has in a decade ? like she is a person, not a position.

Daniel Ashworth is steady, careful, and still carrying the weight of a woman he loved and lost. He remembers things people say once. He sets the cream pitcher on her side of the table before she arrives. He has not, since his wife died, allowed himself to look too closely at the people he loves ? and Lucia is the first person, in three years, who has made him want to.

What unfolds between them is not fast. It is not grand. It is two people, both of whom have learned to hold themselves slightly apart from their own lives, learning ? slowly, honestly, in November kitchens and lakeside cottages and letters written and rewritten four times before they are sent ? to stop.

Thyme and Tenderness is a slow-burn contemporary romance about grief and usefulness and the particular courage it takes to want something after you have spent a long time not allowing yourself to. It is about Italian-American family dinners and inherited secrets and what happens when a woman who has not had a Wednesday to herself in fourteen years is finally given one.

It is about the small things. The clay pot on the windowsill. The way a man can love you by remembering how you take your coffee. The letter you write four times before you send it.

If you love emotionally rich women's fiction ? the kind that makes you read past midnight and wake up still thinking about it ? pour yourself something warm and come sit at this table. There is room.