The Light We Find
When Vivienne Ashford receives a letter from a lawyer she's never met, she returns to Port Verity for the first time in ten years, and to a house she never expected to inherit. Her grandmother Eleanor left her not only the Victorian home overlooking the bay, but a leather-bound ledger and a stack of yellowed letters that threaten to unravel decades of Ashford family history. The coastal town has changed and stayed the same in equal measure: the church of St. Margaret's-by-the-Sea still stands at the water's edge, Mrs. Donnelly still polishes its brass, and Tom Becker, the boy Vivienne loved and left behind, still watches the horizon from the harbor. As Vivienne combs through her grandmother's belongings, whispers surface about Declan Whitfield, about a forbidden summer, about choices that shattered two families. Her sisters Caroline and Lillian arrive from D.C., each carrying their own stake in the inheritance and their own questions about the truth Eleanor kept hidden. When Vivienne discovers what really happened the autumn she fled, and what Tom has protected all these years, she faces an impossible choice: walk away again and let the past stay buried, or stay in Port Verity, face the light she once refused, and risk losing everything she built to find what was always meant to be hers.