The Space Between

Rich Mercer got the girl. That was never going to be the hard part.

Six months after The Current Between Us ends, Caitlin Foss packs her car and drives to Chapel Hill for a two-year graduate program - and Rich is left standing on the same flagstones where this all started, four hundred and ten miles suddenly the only fact that matters.

What follows isn't a wedding. It's Tuesday-night phone calls that slowly become their own kind of architecture. It's learning the difference between the visits and the long stretch of ordinary days between them - the part of a love story nobody puts in the trailer. It's a fifty-three-year-old man who has spent his whole life measuring things - pool times, brake-zone speeds, the exact shape of being alone - finding out what happens when the thing he loves can't be measured, only trusted.

Across two years, a dozen phone calls a week, and the visits that mark the seasons, Rich and Caitlin have to answer the question every long-distance couple eventually faces: is patience still love, or is it just very well-disguised fear? When a career opportunity threatens to redraw the map entirely, they'll find out whether what they built in the quiet, undramatic middle was ever going to be enough to survive contact with a real decision.

The Space Between is a literary contemporary romance about the unglamorous, unbroadcast work of loving someone from a distance - patient, exacting, and quietly devastating in the way only an honest love story can be.

A sequel to The Current Between Us. Read in order for the full arc.