An early look from Margaret M. Manchester
Alone Together is the quietest novel in the Providence Office Series, and perhaps the most intimate. When Jamie Oakley and Eleanor Welles first appeared in my writing, they arrived not as two people seeking love, but as two people who understood loss—its weight, its silence, its long shadows.
Jamie once shared his life with someone. He knows partnership, the give and take of daily love, the comfort of coming home to another person. What he carries now is the carefulness that follows heartbreak and estrangement—the instinct to protect what pieces of himself remain intact.
Eleanor’s solitude is shaped by a different history: the loss of her parents, the long recovery from cancer, and the quiet fear that recurrence might always be waiting just out of view. She learned to stand on her own because she had to. She learned not to need too much because she has experienced the cost of needing.
Their story begins with two people who never expected to open the locked rooms of their hearts again—and certainly not with each other.
It doesn’t unfold with spectacle or grand gestures.
It unfolds in the moments that matter:
- shared dinners
- late-night conversations
- unexpected tenderness
- the stillness of being understood
These are the moments that build the foundation of Alone Together.
Jamie and Eleanor’s story isn’t about fireworks.
It’s about the quiet, profound bravery of finally letting someone in.
I hope this novel offers the same sense of warmth, gentleness, and emotional truth that it brought me while writing it. I look forward to sharing their full story with you this December.
— Margaret M. Manchester