Gemma is a recent widow whose husband died of cancer. She's trying to get pregnant with his remaining embryos, and spends her time volunteering at the hospital with her dog, Bear.
Casey is a 12-year-old with a brain tumor who needs to move to Bristol for tumor zapping for the next month. Her mother, Angelica, has gotten totally paranoid about Casey's exposure to germs/chemicals/life/food/what have you. Needing a place to stay, she contacts the dad she's never met.
Dan is a handsome but uncommitted dude with job vagueness and no real commitments. He's known about his kid but stayed out of her life. Now, for various reasons, he feels like he needs to be there for her now. So he borrows a bigger/plusher flat from a friend and has Casey and Angelica (who's quite reasonably angry at Dan for never being there) move in. And go to the hospital, where they all run into Gemma and make friends.
Dan and Gemma have hormonal chemistry for each other right off, but Gemma's trying to get pregnant right now and Dan has his own issues, along with trying to be a good dad for Casey after all these years. Casey's just trying to survive, sneak some bacon to eat and get her hair dyed and meet a cute guy.
Turns out that Dan has a hell of a backstory explaining his previously not-very-good actions in a lot of ways, which are foreshadowed a bit here and there and then slowly come into "ohhhhh, so THAT's why" realism/focus. This is a well thought out book in that Dan has a crappy past and hasn't behaved the best in the past. He certainly does seem to have improved, but you can get why Angelica's mad as hell and why anyone would have doubts. And yet, the author makes all of this work, and I really enjoyed reading this. Four stars.
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