The Blind Girl

Jaelyn has been blind most of her life, and she has no interest in being anybody's tragedy. She counts sidewalk cracks instead of stars and mentors blind kids at Eyes for the Blind. She has Maverick, a guide dog with a work ethic, and one rule: nobody hands her pity, not even as a joke.

Phoenix, twenty-two, moves the dirtiest money in the city, and dirty money needs somewhere spotless to go. When an old friend offers him a struggling nonprofit as a washing machine, he buys Eyes for the Blind without ever seeing the building. Then a blind girl walks him to the bathroom and wrecks his entire operating system. He takes her to dinner at his grandfather's restaurant and kisses her at her gate. And he starts doing something more dangerous than dealing: he starts hoping.

Then his little brother pulls back a stroller hood at the mall and goes quiet. The toddler inside has Phoenix's exact blue eyes. His name is Malachi. He calls Jaelyn Mommy. A cheek swab turns a blurry, blindfolded party night he half remembers into a two-year-old boy. Phoenix has a son, and he had to find him in the arms of the woman he's falling for.

But clean money attracts dirt. A strange car parks across from Jaelyn's house while Maverick growls at the curtains. Phoenix's drops start leaking, and only three people alive know where he keeps what matters. So he baits the leak, slipping a fake location, the old laundromat on Fifth, to one person only, and waits. What shows up is Cash, a rival on a crate with eight men counting Phoenix's money, and the leak is the one name he never priced: Sia, his best friend, the woman who sold his family's hospital schedule out of his own bed.

Phoenix does the one thing kings never do: he tells Jaelyn everything, the parts that make him look like a fool included. Then he walks the game to the door and closes it: licensed badges, insurance, taxes, a real company called Cater Watch. A living he won't have to bury anybody to keep.

Jaelyn says yes anyway: to a proposal carried down the aisle on Maverick's harness, and to a surgery every doctor warns her not to trust. The bandages come off, and the first thing the world hands back is his face. They marry in the spring. Sia writes a letter from Atlanta asking for nothing. And inside a dented cookie tin, Phoenix's mother, two decades gone, leaves one last envelope, sealed: FOR THE GIRL. WHOEVER SHE IS.

But sight is a loan, not a gift. When gray days fog her kitchen floor, Jaelyn has to learn whether a woman who just learned to see can stand going dark again, with a husband who learned to describe light before he learned to describe love, and a third heartbeat waiting on a wand she can finally read by herself.

The Blind Girl is a full-length contemporary romance about a kingpin who goes legit for a woman who never asked him to, and the little boy who made them a family before they ever met, told in porch swings and peach cobbler, guide dogs and good china, about learning to say what the light is doing and meaning it.