Twenty-eight years separate them. Falling in love brings them together. Building a life will ask more of both of them.

At sixty-four, Vivienne Mercer has settled into a comfortable life in Little Flower, Georgia. Openly lesbian for twenty years, she has devoted friends, familiar routines, and a place at Harbor Books, the town’s struggling independent bookstore. What she hasn’t made room for is the possibility of another great love.

Then Grace Westbrook walks through the door.

Thirty-six and confident in who she is, Grace has arrived to organize a benefit for the bookstore. She’s drawn to Vivienne’s dry wit and the tenderness beneath her guarded manner. Their twenty-eight-year age difference doesn’t discourage her-but Vivienne finds it harder to believe that the future Grace wants could include her.

As preparations for the benefit bring them together, attraction deepens through late evenings, quiet confessions, and small gestures that begin to feel like promises. Vivienne’s carefully ordered world opens to a happiness she thought had passed her by. For Grace, the woman she desires begins to feel like home.

But when jealousy and fear of judgment lead Vivienne to deny their relationship in public, Grace refuses to settle for a love that disappears in front of others. An apology cannot undo the hurt. With the bookstore’s future uncertain and their relationship at a breaking point, Vivienne must confront the fears that have kept her safe-and left her lonely.

Set in a lakeside town in Georgia, The Years Between Us is an emotionally intimate lesbian age-gap romance about desire, belonging, and the courage to love openly. With a close-knit community of women at its heart and a deeply hopeful happy ending, it celebrates the work of rebuilding trust and the joy of choosing a life together.