Small Repairs

Out now · Thistledown Book 2

Some fixes hold more than air.

Marlowe Kestrel fixes things and leaves. It is the family business, and she has never once asked herself if staying was even an option.

Thistledown is supposed to be one more contract. The greenhouse dome that keeps four hundred people fed has a humidity problem. Marlowe has the fix. She will be gone before anyone gets used to her.

Then her fix fails. Publicly. In front of half the settlement, at the one meeting she could not afford to get wrong.

The only person who does not treat her failure like a catastrophe is Hollis Brightwater, Thistledown's schoolteacher, a man who has never once wanted to be anywhere else. He tells her she will get the next part right. He is the first person who has ever let her be wrong without making her feel smaller for it.

Getting it right the second time means doing everything Marlowe does not know how to do: asking instead of diagnosing, staying instead of solving and going, trusting the people who actually live in the space she is trying to fix.