Frozen Goldfish

Sometimes Starting Over Means Leaving It All Behind

Hazel Thistle has spent her entire life in one house, in one town, doing what was expected of her. But after decades of putting herself last—while raising a family and tolerating a philandering husband—Hazy finally reaches her breaking point.

With quiet determination, she slips away from the only life she’s ever known and boards a flight to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. What follows is anything but predictable.

Surrounded by a cast of eccentric expat friends, a supportive son back home, and a striking local man with green eyes, Hazy begins to rewrite her story. Through misadventures, laughter, and rediscovered courage, she finds not only freedom—but herself.

Fall in love with the journey of reinvention, resilience, and the power of starting over at any age.

Ready to run away with Hazy? Grab your copy now and take the leap.

Excerpt from the book

Hazy gazes across the antique Irish linen tablecloth she loves at the husband she doesn’t. How long has it been? Ten years? Fifteen? Longer? Ever since she realized she’s less important to him than his golf clubs. It’s two days past New Year’s and the antique red and gold decorations she had painstakingly put up have been ignored by everyone but her son.

“Pass me that lovely salad, would you, dear?” Marshall smiles, that vacant lawyer half-grin he uses on his clients. “I was just telling my assistant today how you air-dry your own tomatoes from the garden every fall. My talented wife.”

“You had an actual conversation with Sassy Suz?”

He picks up his napkin and holds it across his mouth, chuckling. “She is pretty spirited.”

When did he get his teeth whitened? They’re glowing. Like Chiclets.

Hazy picks up the crystal bowl shaped like lettuce leaves and passes it to him. A bowl she usually saves for company. But tonight … is special.

As he forks out romaine crumbled with blue cheese, smoked bacon, homemade croutons, toasted pine nuts, and dribbled in Hazy’s secret anchovy dressing, he smiles in that looking-right-through-you way he’s perfected. The way a person looks at a well-worn but comfortable sofa that’s been around for twenty years.

He raises one eyebrow. “Any more roast? So tasty after two days of turkey.”

Hazy pushes her chair back, pads across the creaking oak planks of the home she has grown up in, got married in, and raised her family in. In the kitchen, she runs her hands down the front of her apron embroidered with poodles Sean made for Mother’s Day when he was ten. Underneath it she wears the deep green wool shift she had sewn for Christmas Day. Not that anyone but her son had noticed.

Picking up a hunk of beef with her fingers from the serving plate, she dunks it into gravy and stuffs the whole mess into her mouth. And I wonder why I’m a hundred and sixty-nine pounds.

Hazy stares out the kitchen window at her long sloping backyard buried under a foot of early winter snow. Flakes are falling the size of popcorn. Withered rose vines cling to a wicker gate that lists sideways threatening a full collapse. And her little pond with the stone bridge she’d built herself—what? —nine summers ago, is frozen solid. Along with the goldfish she’d forgotten to retrieve before the chill. Usually, she would have netted them into large buckets to live in the basement until spring.

Sorry, goldfish. I’m a bad-bad fish mother. But didn’t I read somewhere they could miraculously thaw out and live to swim another day?

Hazy smiles at the possibility before picking up the heavy silver-plated dish they’d gotten for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary almost ten years ago now. From Dilly? No, too conservative for Sister Dearest. From Loose Eel, as Hazy likes to refer to Lucille, her mother-in-law from hell? Maybe Dad and his new wife Lisanne? Doesn’t matter.

She glances down at her perfect Boeuf Bourguignon on the serving dish, with Chardonnay gravy congealing around the parsley potatoes retrieved from her garden, and carefully stored in her fruit cellar.