In the Weeds (lovelight, #2)

The novel opens with a chance encounter in a nearly empty dive bar in Bar Harbor, Maine. Beckett Porter, a quiet farmer attending an agricultural conference, sits beside a woman named Evie, and their chemistry is instant. A shared glass of tequila turns into two passionate nights at a nearby hotel. Neither learns much about the other's professional life. On the third morning, Beckett wakes to an empty room. She has left without a word.

Three months later, Evelyn St. James, a social media influencer with over a million followers, arrives at Lovelight Farms in Inglewild, Maryland, to evaluate it for a social media contest. She is stunned to discover that her one-night stand is the farm's head farmer. Despite the tension, Beckett asks her to stay and give the farm a fair evaluation, since the contest means everything to Stella, the farm's owner. During her November visit, they settle into an uneasy coexistence of polite distance. Then Evelyn leaves again without saying goodbye.

Months pass. Beckett cannot stop thinking about Evelyn. Meanwhile, at a meeting with her management agency, Sway, Evelyn is pitched content ideas that feel deeply wrong for her values. She realizes she has lost touch with what originally drove her work: telling stories about everyday people and small businesses. Over empanadas with Josie, her best friend and personal assistant, Evelyn confesses she has forgotten how to be happy. When Josie asks where she last felt happy, Evelyn thinks of Lovelight Farms and books a plane ticket.

She arrives in Inglewild without a reservation to find the bed-and-breakfast fully booked. She runs into Beckett on the street, and when she admits this town was the last place she felt happy, his expression softens. He offers her one of his spare bedrooms.

For three days, Beckett avoids the cabin, slipping in only after Evelyn falls asleep and leaving handwritten notes by the coffee machine each morning. When she confronts him about hiding, he promises to stop and that evening appears at the kitchen table to make crab soup, wordlessly handing her a cutting board and an onion.

They settle into a comfortable routine. Evelyn disconnects from social media, helps Inglewild locals with their businesses, and returns each evening to Beckett's kitchen table. One night she cooks her mother's curry recipe, and on the back porch afterward, she shares her backstory: She dreamed of being a journalist but was rejected by traditional media for being "too whimsical" and "too brown," so she built her own platform to help her parents' struggling boutique shop in Portland. Beckett corrects her assumption that he thinks her job is stupid and offers quiet wisdom about happiness: It comes and goes, and one cannot force it, only remain open to it.

Their connection deepens as Evelyn works alongside Beckett in the fields. When his sister Nessa reveals that Carter Dempsey, the ex-boyfriend of another sister, Harper, told Harper she is "only fling material," Beckett drives to the bar to confront him. On the porch that night, he confides that he dreamed of becoming an astronaut as a child but took over his father's position at a produce farm at 15 after his father was paralyzed in a fall from a ladder. He kept the stars with him through maps on the fridge and books about the moon.

The next morning, Evelyn follows a hand-drawn scavenger hunt map Beckett left by the coffee machine, leading to a field of wildflowers marked "Some happy" in tiny block letters. Later, she falls into a freezing pond on the property and walks half a mile soaking wet before Beckett spots her, carries her home, and warms her against his bare chest by the fire.

At trivia night, Evelyn meets Beckett's parents and sisters for the first time. The bar is loud, and Beckett, who has sound sensitivity, endures the noise with increasing strain. Evelyn finds him in the back hallway, overwhelmed. He confesses he thinks about kissing her all the time. During the drive home, he tells her he likes her "so much." After his bedroom door clicks shut, Evelyn whispers to the dark kitchen that she likes him too.

The next morning, she kisses him fiercely against the refrigerator. Beckett pulls back and says he wants to take her on a proper date. Meanwhile, Josie calls with news: The American Small Business Coalition wants to interview Evelyn for a half-remote position advising small businesses on their digital presence. That evening, Beckett appears at her door with a white peony and a bag of cheeseburgers, then leads her to a clearing with two towering oak trees. He names constellations while she points at the sky with a French fry. They sleep together for the first time since Maine, and Beckett makes her promise she will not leave him alone again.

Their relationship becomes public when Beckett kisses Evelyn beneath a flower arch at the town greenhouse, declaring he does not care who sees. When he leaves overnight to retrieve misdelivered saplings from New York, Evelyn drives to Durham, North Carolina, for her interview and is informally offered the job. She returns to find Beckett in the greenhouse, stiff and cold. He came back from New York to an empty cabin and, unable to bear checking the spare room, assumed she had left for good. The note she left, decorated with hand-drawn tulips, was taken by Prancer the cat for her nest. He tells her he cannot keep watching her walk away and calls their romance a complication. She asks him to ask her to stay. He refuses, believing she is too bright to be contained by a small town. She kisses him gently, says she will be back, and drives away.

Alone, Beckett plants trees in the dark at 4 in the morning until friends arrive with shovels. His father confronts him with a list of every time Beckett has sacrificed his own wants for others: "Be selfish, Beckett. Just this once" (278).

While Evelyn formally ends her contract with Sway, Beckett films a video under the twin oak trees. He apologizes for not asking her to stay and tells her she gave him his happy while she was looking for hers: "Come home, honey. Stay with me for a bit" (288). The video goes viral. Evelyn watches it on loop in Sway's conference room, then tells Josie she is on her way.

After hours of silence, Beckett goes to the fields and spots Evelyn at the far edge, holding a shovel, covered in dirt. She tells him she loves him, that she took the new job, and that she rented a house in town. He tells her he has been loving her the whole time. She asks him to say the words, and he cups her face and asks the question he has posed every evening on their porch: "Did you find your happy today?" She kisses him and says yes.

In the epilogue, set one year later, they live together in the cabin. She travels for work but always comes home to fresh flowers and his arms. He wakes her to watch the meteor shower he has had circled on the fridge for months, and they stand under the twin oak trees as shooting stars streak across the sky. A bonus chapter captures their settled domestic life: Evelyn returns from a trip to find eight rescued chickens in the kitchen and Beckett holding his duck, Otis, in his flannel pocket. The scene ends with a cow mooing from behind the greenhouse.