He's the one everyone leans on. No one ever thought to catch him.

For fifteen years, Theo Barnes has been the charge nurse who holds Cedar Vale's emergency department together, the calm center of the loudest room in the hospital, the person every doctor and nurse turns to when the night falls apart. He carries all of them, every shift. He needs nothing. And he is quietly running on empty and pride.

Then Dr. Grace Lim arrives on the night shift. She walked away from a bigger career on purpose, after it nearly destroyed her, and rebuilt her life around hard-won boundaries. She works her hours and then she actually goes home. And she has the inconvenient habit of noticing the exact things Theo has spent a career making sure no one sees, starting with the fact that he is heading straight for the cliff she already went over.

Theo has never once let himself be a burden to anyone. It is the rule his whole life is built on. But the wall everyone leans against is beginning to crack, and when it finally comes down, Theo will have to learn the hardest thing a caregiver can learn: how to be the one who is cared for.

Held is the fifth novel in the Cedar Vale series: warm, tender, closed-door contemporary romance with real medical stakes and quiet, hard-won faith, a grown-up love story about the grace of finally being carried.

Happily ever after guaranteed.