Match

In the heart of Atlanta, matchmaker Dr. Kimmie Scott has built a reputation on a radical idea: she won't introduce a single client until they've done the work of becoming someone who can actually hold love.

A former dancer who lost her career and then herself. An entrepreneur who has been running from stillness since his father drove away. An attorney whose carefully curated list of requirements is really a wall masquerading as standards. A chef who has spent fifteen years leaving before anyone can leave her. A realtor who hasn't picked up a paintbrush since his mother died. A nurse who has given so much of herself to everyone else that her own body is finally screaming for attention. A dance teacher who stopped wanting when she stopped dancing.

They come to Kimmie with their lists and their timelines and their desperate hope that someone else can fix what they haven't been willing to look at. She takes their lists. She thanks them for them. And then she asks the question that changed her own life: What are you afraid will happen if you let someone see you?

What follows is a year of unbuilding—of mirrors and stillness, of letters never sent and compliments never received, of walls built so high they've become invisible to the people living behind them. Kimmie guides her clients toward the terrifying work of becoming whole. But when a rival matchmaker offers her everything she thought she wanted—scale, resources, the chance to reach more people faster—Kimmie must confront her own walls: the ones she built after her first marriage ended, and the fear that her slow, demanding method might be keeping people from the love they're desperate to find.

Told through the intersecting stories of seven people learning to let themselves be seen, MATCH is a novel about what happens when you stop running, when you let the walls fall, and when you become someone who can hold love—not because you found the right person, but because you became the right version of yourself. It is a story about matches that are not made in heaven but built on earth, brick by brick, beam by beam, by people brave enough to unbuild what was never meant to hold them.

Find yourself. Then find each other.