She's been looking for the right man her entire life.
Everyone in Willet Cove knows who it is — except her.
Esme Taylor does not do risk. Not anymore.
Six years ago, she looked at the man she'd married and realized he was trying to turn their brilliant, sensitive son into someone he wasn't — and she did the hardest, bravest thing she'd ever done. She packed his bags. She signed the papers. Her parents sided with him, and she let them go, too. And she promised her kids, then and there, that the next man she let into their lives would love them exactly as they were, or he wouldn't get in at all.
So she opened a flower shop. Raised Robbie — her genius, her whole heart, a fourteen-year-old whose mind works in ways the world doesn't always make room for. And Madison, six years old and made of pure sunshine. She learned how to stop waiting for anyone to come rescue her.
And she's fine. Really.
Except for Grady.
Grady Nash has been her best friend for three years — the man who pulls muffins out of her oven like he lives there, colors unicorns with Madison, watches science documentaries with Robbie, and cannot, for reasons he has never explained, look Esme directly in the eye when she wears the green dress.
He is, in every way that matters, the man she's been looking for her entire life.
Which is exactly the problem. Because Grady runs a surf shack down on the water, lives simply, and wants even less. And Esme — who has sworn she will never again misread a man, never again risk her kids on someone who turns out to be something else — cannot let herself fall for a man who has so visibly chosen to want nothing.
Then Madison falls off the monkey bars at school.
The arm needs surgery. The insurance is bad. The bills are worse. And for the first time since she signed the divorce papers, Esme is staring at a phone number she swore she'd never dial again — her parents' — and wondering how much of her pride she's willing to trade for her daughter's medical bills.
What Esme doesn't know is that Grady could write the check tomorrow.
Before he was Grady Nash, he was Jefferson Hale — Hollywood agent, heir to a famous last name, son of a man whose crimes made national news. When the truth broke, Grady burned his life to the ground and spent the next decade in Willet Cove quietly trying to be the opposite of everything he came from.
He could give Esme everything. The fortune he's never touched. The resources to fix every broken thing in her life twice over.
Except the moment the Hale name surfaces, the scandal comes with it. And a woman and two kids he loves more than his own life will be dragged into the same headlines he's spent a decade shielding them from.
Meanwhile, fourteen-year-old Robbie — who has written a compatibility program that has been disturbingly accurate about every single mom in their little found family — keeps running the numbers on his mother and Grady. The numbers keep coming back the same way.
Robbie, as always, has seen it first.
Second Bloom is the third book in the Parent App series — a warm, emotional, behind-closed-doors friends-to-lovers romance featuring a fiercely protective single-mom florist, a hero with a famous last name and a decade of quiet atonement behind him, a genius teenage boy and his sunshine little sister, meddling teenage matchmakers, a surprisingly accurate compatibility algorithm, and a love story three years in the
