Three women. One season. A whole lot of holding it together.
Leslie has spent thirty-one years handling everything, until the day she realizes she holds her breath every time her husband comes home. Her big sister, Dana, rebuilt her life after a thirty-year marriage ended, but she’s still carrying a secret from the months they lost their mother. And Marley, the friend Leslie meets at a beginner spin class, has walked away from a husband who called her too much. She’s not about to let anyone turn her volume down again.
From October to New Year’s, their stories run side by side: the same sister lunches, the same Saturday spin classes, the same crowded Thanksgiving table, each told from a different heart. Every book tells one woman’s complete story. Read in order, they reveal what each woman is carrying that the others can’t see.
The Breath Trilogy is heartfelt, clean women’s fiction for anyone who has disappeared a little to keep everyone else afloat, and is ready to come back.
Saving My Breath (Marley)
Holding My Breath (Leslie)
Catching My Breath (Dana)
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Holding My Breath:
A Novel of Midlife and Finding Your Voice
She held her breath for thirty years. Then she remembered how to breathe.
At 5:47 on a Tuesday in October, Leslie Huffman hears her husband’s car pull into the garage and realizes she is holding her breath.
She doesn’t know when it started. Robert has never raised a hand to her. He’s never cheated, never lied, never drained the bank account. He just makes comments. Little ones. And when she flinches, he was only joking. She’s so sensitive.
After thirty-one years of marriage, three kids, and a full-time job in HR, Leslie is the woman who handles everything. Then a complaint lands on her desk from a woman describing Leslie’s own life back to her, and something finally cracks.
What follows isn’t a dramatic exit. It’s a list on the kitchen table, a spin class she’s terrified to walk into, a stranger who gives herself gold stars, and a phone call to the sister she hasn’t spoken to in five years.
Holding My Breath is a story about the slow disappearing act so many women perform, and the brave, messy work of coming back.
Catching My Breath
A mother’s journey from rock bottom to redemption proves it’s never too late to become the person you were meant to be.
You don’t catch your breath. You stop running long enough for it to catch up with you.
Three years after her thirty-year marriage ended, Dana Harper has built a life she actually likes. A yellow kitchen that’s all hers. A classroom full of teenagers writing stories. Twin granddaughters every week. A therapist named Lania who keeps asking the hard questions.
Then her little sister calls. After five years of silence, Leslie is ready to talk, and Dana has to decide how much of her own story she’s ready to share.
Because the short version of her divorce, the one she gives at the dentist’s office, leaves out the part that still hurts most. The part with their mother in it.
Between sister lunches, a speed dating night her best friend drags her to, a widowed contractor who’s in no hurry either, and the recipe box their mother left behind, Dana learns that healing isn’t a finish line. Sometimes it’s just learning when to stop running.
Saving My Breath
A beautiful story of love, loss, and the unexpected ways healing finds us when we least expect it.
She’s done explaining herself to people who were never listening.
Marley is the life of the party. The real estate agent with the big laugh, the open-house smile, and a cat named Venus who has opinions about everything. Two marriages in, she has finally walked away from a husband who spent six years telling her she was too much.
Now she gives herself gold stars. She high-fives her own hand after spin class. She’s the friend who says exactly the right thing to Leslie every Saturday over lattes.
What she doesn’t say is that her ex has been telling everyone they used to know that she had a breakdown. Or that she’s been carrying it alone.
Between a skittish stray cat, the patient neighbor who names it Gary, a daughter-in-law who sees more than Marley expected, and two grown sons who know her better than she realized, Marley is about to learn that being done explaining yourself isn’t the same as going quiet.
Some people have been listening all along.