Gerard

She flew home to confront the man her sister could never let go of. She stayed to marry him.

Nicole Wyman has an Oscar nomination, a beach house on the Pacific, and an agent who tells her she is finished at twenty-eight. She also has a half-sister in a locked psychiatric ward who still insists Gerard Collins belongs to her. Nicole flies back to Hyannis to settle it, walks in on his dinner, and finds the boy she never stopped wanting standing on the ballot for the United States Senate.

They never dated. At church and at school she wanted him and said nothing, sure it ran one way. He has carried her in his head since the day she left.

Gerard's campaign manager keeps a spreadsheet of women who will marry him for one hundred thousand dollars a year. Gerard turns down every name on that list. He tells Nicole to her face that he will not pretend with her and will not marry her to win an election. Then he buys her a ring he means, and they say it out loud before the engagement is a day old.

Neither of them plans for the rest of it. Gerard put his name on that ballot to help his FBI brother break the Boroni crime family, and the Boronis work that out. A gunman runs his car off the highway. Someone leaks a faked tape with her name attached. And Stella walks out of her hospital on a release form signed in Nicole's name.

So Gerard does the only thing he can think of and sends her three thousand miles away. Nicole gets on the next plane back and stands beside him anyway.

Tropes: the one that got away, reunion, whirlwind marriage, obsessed stalker, FBI and the mob, protective veteran hero, Hollywood heroine goes home, big Irish Catholic family.

Narrated by Victoria Pinder in an AI digital voice.