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Pulling for You
Someone you love has been paying for your luck.Fran Lomax is the one who got out. A physiotherapy practice with her name on the door, a good flat in Manchester, and a lifetime of small good fortune she has never once had to think about — the job that opened up, the rain that held off, the last parking space. Back in Calder Hey, the mill town she comes from, her family's weather has always run the other way. Her mother cleans at the health centre and has entered the club raffle every week for twenty years without once coming up. Her brother Col's van spends more of its life at the garage than on the road. Nobody minds. Nobody has ever asked Fran for a single thing.
Then, home for her father's retirement do, she stands in her mother's kitchen and finally sees the pinboard by the cooker, her own face on it fifteen times over, twenty years deep. Fran reads bodies for a living — the quiet ways one side carries the other — and once she turns that eye on her own house, the pattern under twenty years of luck will take her apart and put her back together somewhere she never expected to stand.
What she learns, she learns the way this family teaches sideways, at the table, never quite out loud. It cannot be refused — she tries. It cannot be bought out — she tries that too, and the money lands, and it hurts, and it moves nothing. And it must never be told to the one it's for, because the lucky, once they know, get careful — and careful wastes it. Nobody in that warm, noisy, unlucky house will say a word. It isn't coldness. It is the house rule the love runs on. And there is exactly one thing — one — that the luck of a house honours.
PULLING FOR YOU is a love story in which nobody falls in a mother and a daughter, a brother and a sister, an aunt and a niece — one family, one kitchen, twenty years, and everything it means said in gravy, in lifts to the station, in the good chair kept for you, and never once in words. It is the story of what Fran chooses when she has seen the pattern her own days begin gently going wrong — and she has never been happier.
Who goes up on the pinboard by your cooker — and whose kitchen, all these years, has had a photograph of you?
A complete story, first page to last. No series, no cliffhanger.
Then, home for her father's retirement do, she stands in her mother's kitchen and finally sees the pinboard by the cooker, her own face on it fifteen times over, twenty years deep. Fran reads bodies for a living — the quiet ways one side carries the other — and once she turns that eye on her own house, the pattern under twenty years of luck will take her apart and put her back together somewhere she never expected to stand.
What she learns, she learns the way this family teaches sideways, at the table, never quite out loud. It cannot be refused — she tries. It cannot be bought out — she tries that too, and the money lands, and it hurts, and it moves nothing. And it must never be told to the one it's for, because the lucky, once they know, get careful — and careful wastes it. Nobody in that warm, noisy, unlucky house will say a word. It isn't coldness. It is the house rule the love runs on. And there is exactly one thing — one — that the luck of a house honours.
PULLING FOR YOU is a love story in which nobody falls in a mother and a daughter, a brother and a sister, an aunt and a niece — one family, one kitchen, twenty years, and everything it means said in gravy, in lifts to the station, in the good chair kept for you, and never once in words. It is the story of what Fran chooses when she has seen the pattern her own days begin gently going wrong — and she has never been happier.
Who goes up on the pinboard by your cooker — and whose kitchen, all these years, has had a photograph of you?
A complete story, first page to last. No series, no cliffhanger.
279 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 9, 2026
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