Twenty-three-year-old Josephine "Joey" LeBlanc is supposed to know what comes next.
She has a fianc© who loves her, a wedding ahead of her, and a future that seems already mapped out. But after a doctor tells Joey that having children may be unlikely, the life she and Ethan have been planning begins to feel less like a promise and more like something she is struggling to breathe inside.
Needing space to think, Joey leaves Butte alone and heads into the mountains of southwestern Montana on a backcountry route she and Ethan had planned to hike together.
Then a June storm rolls across the Divide.
Lost, injured, and soaked through, Joey follows a drainage until she finds an old cabin tucked beside a creek. It is dusty and long abandoned, but it offers four walls, a roof, and enough shelter to survive the night.
By morning, something has changed.
The dust is gone.
The cabin is no longer abandoned.
And the stranger who arrives on horseback insists it belongs to him.
His name is Jed Mercer. The nearest town, he tells her, is Coolidge-a mining settlement just a few miles downstream.
Joey knows Coolidge.
She has walked through its ruins.
Because in her world, Coolidge has been abandoned for nearly a century.
In Jed's, the year is 1915.
With no explanation for how she crossed more than a hundred years-or whether she can ever cross back-Joey is forced to make a life in a world she knows only as history. Coolidge is still young, its future unwritten to everyone except her. The Allen family takes her in. A community becomes familiar. And Jed, the quiet Tennessee-born homesteader who first found her stranded in the mountains, becomes far more than the man who helped her survive.
The longer Joey remains in 1915, the more complicated the word home becomes.
Because Ethan is still in 2026, searching for a woman who vanished into the mountains. Joey still loves him. She still belongs to a century of cars, electricity, medicine, and choices women in 1915 cannot imagine.
But she is also building something here.
Friendships. Family. A life.
And Jed.
When the impossible doorway between the two centuries opens again, Joey is finally given what she thought she wanted from the beginning:
A way home.
But going back means leaving behind people who have become as real and necessary to her as anyone she has ever loved. Staying means surrendering everything familiar-and choosing a future whose hardships she may understand better than the people living toward them.
Set against the real history and rugged landscape of southwestern Montana, The Divide is a sweeping historical time-slip novel about love, belonging, faith, family, and the lives we choose when the future we planned is no longer the one we want.
Joey crossed the Divide looking for room to breathe.
What she finds on the other side will ask her to decide where she truly belongs.
