Coming About

The coffee mug was thick enough to hold heat for hours, but nothing Celeste Marlowe had built in the years since leaving Harrow Cove could hold her together through the funeral she'd spent three months avoiding. Forty miles north of the nearest city, Harrow Cove is a town where the fog rolls in and never fully lifts, and where the Ashworth and Marlowe families have been tangled in each other's stories for generations. Celeste is there for Eleanor Marlowe's memorial, for her sister Mara Voss who hasn't spoken to her in two years, and for the secrets buried under the pine trees that still won't stop bleeding. Declan Ashworth is the first thing she sees when the rain clears outside the funeral hall, not the grieving neighbor she remembered from childhood, but the man who broke her trust and watched her leave without reaching out. Theo Ashworth, his younger brother, sees the way Celeste freezes when Declan's name crosses her mouth and says nothing. Margot Ellis, the town's quiet chronicler, has been keeping files for decades, and Jonah Crane, the harbor pilot who knows every current around the cove, is waiting to see which way she'll turn. But Harrow Cove has its own current. Ned Ashworth keeps the old lighthouse that no longer casts light, and the townspeople gather on the docks in the way they have for years, watching, waiting, knowing exactly who belongs to whom. Celeste came for a funeral. She will be offered something else entirely: a place to anchor, a life where the water isn't always churning, a man who wants her to stay. Staying means coming about, reversing course, turning back into the wind. And in a town built on tides, that's the most dangerous thing a person can do.