Lena is thirty-eight, freshly divorced, and standing in a house that used to hold a family. Her daughter just married and moved out. Her ex-husband traded her in for a younger version of herself. She has no car, no license, and no idea who she is without the roles she built her life around. So she downloads a dating app. What follows is not a love story. It is something better — the account of a woman who goes looking for someone to fill the silence and finds, one blocked number at a time, that the silence was never the problem. Sharp, funny, and quietly devastating, *Rooted & Rising* is about the specific courage it takes to stop making yourself smaller, to tend your own life without an audience, and to discover that the person you were waiting for was there all along.