Hello, Friend. My name is Bernadette Waters. Appropriate since I've felt afloat most of my twenty-seven years because my mother and I moved from state to state, finally landing in Arizona. For the past two of those years, I faithfully nursed my sick mother and lost her anyway. After I emerged from the fog of grief, I looked for something or someone to latch on to. I had no other family that I knew of, and my mother had refused to share details of my biological father. Then I realized that in her last days, she'd inadvertently left me a clue.
We'd been snuggled together watching a show and an ad for whiskey had come on the screen. She'd whispered that my father worked in the bourbon industry. When I'd pounced for more information, she'd lapsed into a coughing spasm that spiraled into a trip to the emergency room. I didn't bring it up again in the short time we'd had left.
After my recollection, though, I found myself casually doing research on the whiskey industry and discovered that bourbon is a special subset of brown liquor—it can't be labeled as bourbon unless it's made in the state of Kentucky. Suddenly the location of my biological father narrowed from the entire planet to one of the few states I'd never lived in. With a little more research I learned that bourbon is a big honking deal in Kentucky and apparently the grass there is blue? That seemed worth looking into.
So I packed everything I owned into my mom's beater van and drove the 2000 miles to Kentucky, then landed a job as a tour guide along the trail of bourbon distilleries. What do I know about bourbon? As much as I know about my dad: nothing. But it seemed like the best way to find a man who worked—works?—in the industry. I'm giving myself six months to search.
And what will I do if and when I find the man who abandoned my sweet mother and me before I could walk? I'm not sure. Maybe I'll kiss him… maybe I'll kill him.
Let's do this.
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Welcome! The *FREE* BOURBON GIRL daily serial launches here July 1 and runs through December 31, 2025. The episodes will accumulate for 10 days to allow as many readers as possible to get on board, so please invite all your reader friends to join in by sending them a link to this page! Beginning July 11, this page will revert to showing only the current day's episode. A day's episode will display for 24 hours, approximately 4am Eastern to 4am Eastern.
For readers who want to catch up or read ahead, an e-novella of each month's episodes (six e-novellas in all) are available exclusively from Amazon and Kindle Unlimited; see links at the top and bottom of this page. At the end of the serial, the complete BOURBON GIRL story will be available in print. Thanks so much for coming along as the story unfolds!
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