Almost Always : A Novel About Second Chances, Forgiveness, and the Stories We Rewrite

When a washed-up screenwriter is hired to run a writing retreat in a crumbling manor by the river, the last person he expects to meet is the woman who once ghostwrote his greatest success—and the daughter who changes everything.

Once upon a time, James Fallon was Hollywood’s golden boy: clever, magnetic, and impossible to work with. Then came the silence, the lost decade, and a single script he didn’t actually write. Now he’s retreated from the world—and the world has mostly returned the favor. When an eccentric arts foundation offers him a last-chance post teaching storytelling to strangers, he takes it. The pay is terrible, the plumbing worse, and the ghosts are all inconveniently alive.

Eliza Marquez was that ghost. Once his secret collaborator and uncredited heart, she’s spent years rebuilding herself in smaller, quieter ways—raising her daughter, teaching craft, and keeping her name out of the credits that should have been hers. But when the retreat opens its doors to a dozen broken creatives, Eliza is invited to consult. And as stormlight gathers over the house, she finds herself face-to-face with the man who made and unmade her career.

Over one extraordinary season by the river, the three of them—James, Eliza, and eleven-year-old Lucy—begin rewriting the stories they thought were over. What starts as a fragile truce becomes a luminous exploration of forgiveness, creative renewal, and the ordinary excellence of staying. Between a bench, a mirror, and a bowl of lemons, they rediscover how art heals what life fractures—and how love, once unspoken, can still be rewritten.

Almost Always is a deeply human, slow-burn literary romance about second chances, the power of words, and the courage to be seen as you really are. Told with Laura Carpenter’s signature emotional precision and cinematic grace, it’s a novel about what happens after “The End”—when characters, and people, decide they’re not finished yet.


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✨ Readers will love

Second-chance love story between former collaborators

Father–daughter tenderness that feels like real life

Creative burnout and midlife reinvention with heart

Smart, consent-forward intimacy and emotional aftercare

The Beach Read × Daisy Jones × Midnight Library tone—hopeful, witty, deeply felt