Some stories don’t begin with fireworks.
They begin with a pull.
A change in the air.
A place that feels charged with memory and possibility.
A woman standing on the edge of a life she no longer recognises—about to step into one she never expected.
✨ The Love in Panama Prequel is out now ✨
A slow-burn destination romance of forbidden love and dangerous desire—and for a limited time, it’s only 99c.
This prequel sets the emotional foundation for Love in Panama—introducing the landscape, the legacy, and the quiet tension that will shape everything to come. It’s about awakening rather than escape… and what happens when love arrives not as something safe, but as something true.
🌺 Get the prequel now for just 99c:
AMAZON
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GBN3ZSHJ
CA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0GBN3ZSHJ
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0GBN3ZSHJ
AU: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0GBN3ZSHJ
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📖 free chapter…
read below and step directly into the world of Love in Panama—the heat, the landscape, the pull of something that feels both dangerous and inevitable.
If you’ve ever dreamed of losing yourself in a place that changes you…
If you believe it’s never too late for desire, truth, or love…
This story was written for you.
With love and gratitude,
CHAPTER ONE
Mary-Anne Calder was forty-four years old, and some days she still caught herself thinking, I dream I’m on vacation. It’s the perfect career for me.
It was a small affirmation, a private joke she whispered to herself when life felt especially tight, especially sharp. Vacation, she told herself, was the perfect vocation—beautiful places, soft mornings, long horizons. And yet here she was, three weeks before Christmas, standing in the kitchen of the house she had helped build and restore, while the man she had shared sixteen years with unraveled in front of her.
Roger’s voice cracked the air like a whip.
He was furious—at the banks, at the economy, at the world—but most of all, at her.
He hurled his stress and rage as if they were stones, flung without thought or mercy. Every fear he carried, every failure he refused to face, landed squarely on Mary-Anne’s chest. She absorbed it as she always had. She had learned long ago how to be still, how to soften herself around his storms, how to make space for his anger so it would not become something worse.
No matter how much she contributed.
No matter how much she gave.
No matter how she bent herself into peace.
It was never enough.
He blamed her for the downturn in his income. Blamed her for not generating enough money to replace it. As if the world had not changed. As if she had not tried to explain—carefully, calmly—that artificial intelligence had decimated her illustration career. For years, she had made a good living illustrating children’s books, pouring warmth and wonder into pages meant to make children feel safe.
He did not listen.
He never did.
Instead, he blamed her for everything and took responsibility for nothing.
She thought, dimly, I need to leave. But the thought frightened her almost as much as staying. This was her home. She had nowhere else to go.
She turned away from him and let her eyes roam the space she knew better than her own body. The vast marble open-plan kitchen gleamed under soft afternoon light. Emerald-green chairs imported from Spain circled a bespoke architect-designed table—beautiful, expensive things she had never asked for. Beyond the glass, the lawn swept outward, rolling and manicured, trailing toward the edges of the nine-acre property they owned.
Once, she had loved the wide horizon stretching across Puget Sound, the water shifting from steel gray to silver depending on the light. From Whidbey Island, the San Juans rose like distant promises—blue silhouettes that seemed close enough to reach, yet always just out of grasp. It had felt like possibility. Like breathing.
Now it felt like too much.
The beauty pressed in on her. The space magnified her loneliness. She needed courage. The kind her grandmother had once summoned—the kind that allowed a sixteen-year-old girl to leave everything she knew and chase a better life across the world. Mary-Anne closed her eyes and imagined that courage taking flight inside her, lifting her the way dreams once had.
Perhaps one day, she thought, seeding a thought her consciousness, she might meet a man who truly loved her. She heaved a great sigh and chided herself for dreaming of impossibilities.
The idea felt as fanciful as a pink unicorn flying across the sky.
Her mind drifted, as it often did when things felt unbearable, to her grandmother, Regina. Born in Scotland, Regina had grown up under a sky of shifting gray, where endurance was learned early and dreams were often postponed. At sixteen, she had left everything she knew behind—crossing oceans first to the Pacific Northwest, and later chasing a vision of eternal spring that would carry her even farther.
Panama.
A land of warmth and abundance. There, Regina had met a wealthy landowner, married, and built a life that—at least in her letters—had sounded rich with love, purpose, and sun.
Her grandmother’s last letter had urged her to come.
Come to Panama, she had written. Start again.
Regina had never liked Roger.
If you love each other, why haven’t you married? her grandmother would ask.
Mary-Anne always replied the same way: He hasn’t asked me.
As if that settled it.
She never reminded her grandmother that her parents’ marriage had ended in an acrimonious divorce when she was six. It felt unnecessary to explain a history that had never truly claimed her. She had grown up wary of promises, suspicious of institutions that spoke of permanence while quietly rehearsing their exits.
Attachment, Mary-Anne learned early, was conditional.
Once, when she was five, Mary-Anne had stood at the top of the stairs while her parents argued below. Their voices rose and fell, not in anger exactly, but in exhaustion—as if they had already stopped fighting for anything that mattered. No one noticed her there. No one looked up. After a while, she went back to her room and closed the door, learning for the first time how easily a child could disappear inside her own house.
It was then that the drawings came.
A lion at first—large, watchful, its eyes steady and unafraid. She drew it over and over, filling page after page with its mane, its quiet power, the way it seemed to stand guard at the edge of something dangerous. The lion did not shout. It did not leave. It stayed.
Then others followed. Creatures both real and imagined, companions born of graphite and paper. They crowded her notebooks, taking up the space she did not dare claim for herself. Through them, she learned how to make something protective out of fear, how to turn silence into shape.
Long before she understood what art was, Mary-Anne had already discovered its purpose.
It was how she survived.
Her parents were gone now. Both of them. Sudden deaths, the coroner had said. No explanation. No warning. Just absence. The kind that arrives without ceremony and leaves nothing solid to grieve.
Three years had passed. She realized—sometimes with a flicker of shame, sometimes with relief—that she did not miss them in the way people expected. There was no sharp ache, no hollowing loss. What lingered instead was a familiar distance, the echo of a childhood spent learning how not to need too much.
Perhaps that was why Mary-Anne had never trusted marriage, never trusted the idea of forever spoken aloud. Not because she didn’t believe in love—but because she had learned that the people who promised it most easily were often the first to disappear.
The only person she had ever truly loved was her grandmother, and the geographical distance between them had always been a quiet ache in Mary-Anne’s chest.
Regina knew how cruel Roger could be—though not always. If he had been cruel all the time, Mary-Anne would have left years ago. She understood, too, that Roger had endured his own childhood trauma. In her more honest moments, Mary-Anne recognized the truth for what it was: they were bound together by shared wounds, not shared dreams.
A trauma bond.
Not the best foundation for a future.
Perhaps that was why they never had children.
Her grandmother had urged her to let the old life die and be reborn, just as Regina herself had done. But Mary-Anne could not—would not—let go. She no longer loved her partner, but the house had become her sanctuary.
How could she abandon the one place that felt safe?
The answer came just before Christmas.
“Fucking banks,” Roger snarled, slamming a letter onto the marble counter.
Mary-Anne flinched. “What’s that?”
“They want the loan repaid. Or they’ll force a sale.”
Her heart slammed into her ribs. “What do you mean? You said we were okay. You said they’d wait.”
“They won’t. The money’s gone. Nothing’s flowing. This whole U.S. economy is broken.”
She felt the bitter truth of it settle in her bones—the lockdowns, the businesses that never quite recovered, the debt piled high on households and governments alike. They had borrowed too much to renovate this gracious old home, chasing a version of success she had never wanted.
She had been happy with the rambling house as it was. She didn’t need marble countertops or imported chairs. She wanted a simple life.
A life that was less—and yet more.
A life where she felt loved. Safe.
She had warned him. Asked how they would ever repay the debt. He had dismissed her, speaking with the same anger that made her feel small, foolish, invisible. He had shut down her ideas—about using the land, about hosting guests, about letting the property generate income.
Then COVID came. Borders closed. Businesses collapsed. The money that once flowed like a river slowed to a stream and then dried up entirely. Roger sold his business—their lifeline, his pride, the sports car that had long since stopped being fun to drive. The money vanished.
Mary-Anne had known this moment would come.
She simply hadn’t known what would follow.
The email arrived the next morning.
At first, she thought it was a hoax—one of those scams announcing an unexpected inheritance and promising sudden wealth. But this one was different.
We regret to inform you that your grandmother has passed. We act on her behalf. In accordance with her instructions, you are required to travel to Panama immediately. She has left her entire estate and business interests to you. There are additional stipulations to be discussed in person.
Mary-Anne wept—for the woman who had loved her best, for the courage she had not found while Regina was alive, for the life she had delayed too long. Guilt hollowed her out, but beneath it stirred something else.
Resolve.
She looked around the house that was about to be sold and thought, If not now, when?
Her illustration career had been destroyed by AI. Her clients now generated images on their phones and laptops—tools that did not know joy or fear or healing. She had nothing left to anchor her here.
No family she trusted.
No future she believed in.
She thought of her brother—angry, greedy, cruel. As a child, he had terrorized her with shadows and invented monsters, shouting in the dark until fear lived under her skin. Drawing had saved her. Art had given her a way to turn terror into beauty, to offer children magic instead of nightmares.
Perhaps, she thought, Panama was not an ending after all.
Perhaps it was the beginning she had been afraid to claim.
And somewhere far away, beneath a different sky, a life waited for her—one she could not yet imagine, but would soon have no choice but to face.
I adore hearing where the story landed for you. If something sparked, surprised, or stayed with you, I’d be delighted if you emailed me and shared your reader joy. These stories live because of you.
🌺 Get the prequel now for just 99c:
AMAZON
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GBN3ZSHJ
CA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0GBN3ZSHJ
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0GBN3ZSHJ
AU: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0GBN3ZSHJ
iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo & other great bookstores:
https://books2read.com/u/bzlqeE
YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY:
Writing Love in Panama at Christmas
Love in Panama: A Later-in-Life Destination Romance
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Love In Mexico (Ruby and Oliver)
Love In Sicily (Gianni and Kate)
Love In Montana (Lizzie and Jack)
Love in Tuscany (Lorenzo and Sophia)
Love In Greece ( (Sophia and Aris)
Love in Santorini (Helena And Damon)
Love in Memphis (Cassidy and Ethan)