The Pew Whisperer

When Tate Wyecomb's truck dies outside a half-restored church in the middle of nowhere, he expects a few hours' wait for a part. He gets five days he never saw coming. Wes Conrad is the church's only occupant - a defrocked minister who spends his mornings talking to an empty room and his nights reciting Alan Watts over bourbon he doesn't bother hiding. Tate is a ranch hand raised on the belief that love has to be earned, confession before restoration, one honest reckoning at a time. Neither man is looking for what the other one turns out to have. Over five days - two churches, a stranger's headstone, and a lot more silence than either man is used to - the careful architecture each of them built to survive their own grief starts, quietly, to come apart. Wes is still trying to rebuild the one thing he actually lost. Tate is still carrying a debt to his brother that no apology will ever cover. And somewhere past the edge of town, a church Wes fled two years ago and never finished has, impossibly, come back to life without him. The Pew Whisperer is a quiet, unflinching novel about the difference between the love you have to earn and the love that was already there before you did anything to deserve it - and what it costs a man to find out, too late or just in time, which one he's been living inside of.