The Crossing Hour
By Ricks, Angela
The tide turns at twenty to six, and Cass Merrow is on the water for it. For seven hundred years a ferry has crossed the River Vael. For the last eighteen months it has been Cass alone: her father's boat, her father's timetable, and eleven minutes a day of slack water, where the river goes still and so, briefly, does grief. Then the county sends an engineer to plan the bridge that will finish the crossing for good. Elias Hartt measures ground for a living. He is not supposed to fall for a left-handed boat, a village that buries its dead by water, or the ferryman who tells him the truth at short range. But the ground beneath the proposed bridge is telling a truth of its own - one his firm would rather phrase away. And when Eli has to choose between the career that built him and the crossing that is quietly rebuilding them all, the cost lands on everyone standing on both banks. A warm, closed-door romance about honest ground, slow tides, and the eleven minutes a day when everything stops. For readers of Libby Page, Rachel Joyce and Phaedra Patrick.