Neighbors — Jeanne Irelan

Paige Crowell, a childless widow in her late forties and bank vice-president, is finally beginning to feel at home in her new/old house. She is happy to live far across Nashville from where she and her deceased husband lived in until his death when she discovered he had been faithless to her for many years. Because of this, Paige had become wary of involvement with any men that came into her life, But her reluctance to commit begins to change when she starts dating first a publisher and then pastor Ken Geitner, to whom she feels a real affinity. But another romance has been going on in her own neighborhood, with the extreme disapproval of her officious neighbor, Martha Metcalf. Martha has been observing the new neighbors, the arty Carpenters, who have recently moved in across the street in an identical but rundown 1900 house to her own place. Unlike the Metcalfs' son Rick, who attends prestigious Duke, the Carpenter's beautiful daughter, Aurora, goes to a small college in Kentucky. Over the course of the summer, both romances blossom, but Stewart Carpenter, originally from Martha's home town of Memphis, knows a secret that Martha has kept hidden, even from her family, all these years. It takes a tragedy for the two families to decide about the direction their individual lives will take. And through these troubles Ken and Paige must decide about their own future together.