What the Sea Returns
Rosalind Fairfax fled Cape Marrow the summer she turned eighteen, leaving behind a crumbling family legacy, a cliffside lighthouse, and Wilder Hayes, the boy who loved her before he knew how to say it. A decade later, she has built a careful life elsewhere, one measured in miles and silence. Then a single phone call from her younger sister Tessa pulls her back to the fog-soaked coast she swore she'd never see, and Rosalind discovers that Cape Marrow has been keeping its secrets the way the sea keeps shipwrecks: patient, submerged, and waiting to be dragged into the light. Wilder is no longer the brooding teenager Rosalind remembers. He is now the town's harbor master, deeply rooted in the community Rosalind abandoned, and the only person willing to tell her the truth about what her family left behind. As the Fairfax estate teeters on the edge of foreclosure and old rumors resurface through the sharp-tongued widow Mabel Penrose and the enigmatic Margot Voss, Rosalind finds herself reluctantly relying on the very man she once dismissed. But the deeper Rosalind digs into her family's past, the more she realizes the lighthouse has been signaling all along, and that Wilder has been carrying a piece of her he never returned. With the town's powerful Hartley Shaw III circling the Fairfax property and her sister's future hanging in the balance, Rosalind must finally decide what she is willing to let the sea reclaim, and what she will fight to keep above the tide.