Kettler Island Series

Land trust attorney Wren Solís arrives on Kettler Island, Maine in late September with a contested conservation easement file and six weeks to build a case. The easement on the Calloway headland—thirty-two acres of coastal granite and spruce—has been in place since 1991. A five-year gap in the monitoring logs has given Petra Calloway's attorney the opening he needs to challenge it. The county hearing is December ninth.

Code enforcement officer Liam Croft has been walking the Calloway parcel on Sunday mornings for twelve years. He knows the record—its gaps, its strengths, what the land actually shows—and he has documentation in a desk drawer that he has not filed, for reasons involving the selectman chair, who is Petra Calloway's uncle, and a prior officer whose conduct the folder describes. He has been waiting for the calculus to shift.

As Wren works through ferry manifests, a dead field officer's private notebooks, and the donor's letters found in the island library's back room, the case builds layer by layer toward December ninth. So does everything else.

The Easement Line is a slow-burn clean romance set on a ferry-dependent Maine island, built around two people who understand what it costs to maintain a thing worth keeping.