He has one last chance to reclaim the love of his life...if she's still alive.
Ben Fletcher seems to have it all going for him. In his early fifties, he’s in great shape thanks to a disciplined regimen of weight training, swimming and martial arts. He has a job that pays him a good living in the charming Wisconsin city of La Crosse. Divorced a quarter-century earlier, he remains close to his two grown children and grandkids. Ben is content with his life.
But he’s not happy. Twenty years ago, he was, during that glorious year and a half he was dating the glamorous Veronica Starr. They were an “item”: Ben, the city’s highest-rated radio announcer, and Ronnie, an award-winning TV newscaster. They were starting to talk about the future, one that would include marriage and kids. But then, Ben made a stupid mistake, and it all came crashing down. Ronnie broke off the relationship, met an older man and married him. Within a year she was gone, moving with her new husband to the Twin Cities. Ben had no choice but to move on with his life the best he could.
One day, he’s cleaning out a file cabinet in his office and finds an old catalog. Before throwing it out, he riffles through its pages, and an envelope drops onto his desk. Opening it, he finds a card. In handwriting he immediately recognizes as Ronnie’s are a phone number and the words, “Please help me.” When he looks again at the envelope he sees the postmark: it had been sent five years earlier…just before Veronica Starr left her husband, quit her job and disappeared.
David’s latest book is The Dance We Shared (Men of Honor Book 3).
╰┈➤Book Details
● Title: The Dance We Shared (Men of Honor Book 3)
● Author: David Tindell
● Genre: Romantic Suspense
● Sub-genre: (coming soon)
● Language:English
● Pages: 229
● Paperback ISBN: (coming soon)
● Publisher: KDP
● Publication Date: August 9, 2026
● Price: Kindle $2.99
Please help me.
Three words. The first from her in…how long? They were definitely hers, though. Not in an email but real ink on paper, and not typed, but written, in her distinct, precise and very feminine cursive, with a phone number below. On the inside of a card, otherwise blank. On the face of the card, the Minneapolis skyline.
The square envelope, empty now, lay there on my desk, its face staring up at me. My office address, also in her hand. No return address, though. And the kicker: the postmark. The card had been sent from the Twin Cities almost exactly five years ago.
It was the start of a new week, and my first order of business for the morning was to clean out a filing cabinet that was due to be taken away, destined for a homeless shelter. The athletic director had emailed the staff, asking us to consider donating little-used office furniture to the cause. Today was the deadline to have stuff ready for a crew of students to haul away. The cabinet was an easy choice. As the media relations director for athletics at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, I had a lot of records, and since most of them now were electronic, I really had no use for this old gray clunker. What paper there was inside, I thought, could be sorted through, most of it discarded, the important stuff filed in the one remaining cabinet.
I’d pulled a catalog out of the bottom drawer, from some long-forgotten and probably shuttered sporting goods supplier and was just about to toss it into the trash bin when something—that’s all I can call it, something—prompted me to riffle through the pages. You never knew. And the envelope dropped out and onto my desk.
Getting something from the Twin Cities wasn’t out of the ordinary. Here in La Crosse, everybody was familiar with the Minnesota metropolis ninety minutes away. People listened to its radio stations and watched its TV channels, and went there for the shopping, college and pro sports, the theaters, and of course the airport. I went there only when work demanded it, and if I flew anywhere, it was usually out of the smaller airport in La Crosse, where I’d lived for the past quarter-century. I avoided the Cities because she worked there. Or used to, until she left. And it wasn’t as if she’d resigned from her high-visibility job as morning news anchor on the market’s highest-rated TV station and went somewhere else, maybe the network’s morning show in New York, which is where I always assumed she’d wind up.
No. It was five years ago, right after the date on the postmark, that Veronica Starr, the love of my life, vanished.
– Excerpted from The Dance We Shared by David Tindell, KDP, 2026. Reprinted with permission.
David Tindell was born in Germany and grew up in southwest Wisconsin. Together with his wife Sue, he’s traveled the world, seeking new locales for his novels. He trains in the martial arts, dabbles in radio and joins Sue in the never-ending search for the perfect chai tea latte.
His latest book is The Dance We Shared (Book 3 in Men of Honor). Other books include The Heights of Valor (Book 1 in Men of Honor) and The Man In the Arena (Book 2 in Men of Honor.
Visit his website at www.davidtindellauthor.com.
Connect with him on social media at:
╰┈➤ X: www.x.com/davidtindell1
╰┈➤ Facebook: www.facebook.com/DavidTindellAuthor
╰┈➤ Instagram: www.instagram.com/djtindellauthor
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