Mara Quinn has her life exactly where she wants it. A nonprofit she built from nothing. A grant that could change tenant advocacy in Portland. A clipboard, a plan, and absolutely no time for ghosts.
Then a tour bus pulls up outside her benefit concert, and the ghost steps off it holding a guitar.
Ethan Mercer was her whole heart at twenty-one — basement apartment, borrowed t-shirts, songs written at three in the morning with her name hidden inside them. Then his band got big, the road took him, and the letters stopped. Eleven years of silence. Mara told herself she was over him approximately six thousand times.
She never once believed it.
Now Hollow Ground's frontman is playing an acoustic set at her event, singing the song he wrote on her apartment floor to four hundred strangers — and looking at exactly one person in the room. Before the bus door closes, he does something reckless: grabs her hand and writes his number on her palm in Sharpie. Like they're kids again. Like eleven years can fit inside ten digits.
One show becomes a drive to Seattle. Seattle becomes a flight to Denver. And somewhere between the quiet bar where he asks permission to kiss her and the unfinished song he's too scared to play her, Mara realizes the man on the magazine covers is still the boy who knew exactly how she took her coffee.
But she has a life he can't tour with, and he has a life that already took him from her once. Loving Ethan was never the problem. Keeping him — keeping herself — while the machine that owns his calendar pulls him across the country, that's the part they never solved.
This time they're not kids. This time they know the cost.
This time, they have to choose it anyway.
Encore for Us is a slow burn second chance romance about ex lovers who never healed, the song that waited eleven years to be finished, and a love that
