What the Tide Kept

When Seren Blackwell's aging Subaru coughs its way down the last cliffside bend into Harrowgate, she isn't returning for a reunion, she's returning because there is nowhere left to run. The coastal town hasn't forgiven her for leaving a decade ago, and neither has Cillian Dray, the boy she left standing on the black rocks the summer everything fell apart. Now a marine researcher with salt under his nails and a quiet grudge, Cillian greets Seren like a stranger, and looks at her like he remembers everything she tried to forget. As Seren settles into her late aunt's weathered cliff house and reconnects with old friends Juno Okafor and Tomás Reyes, she discovers her aunt kept more than furniture and fading photographs. Letters surface. An unmarked key appears. And the question she never thought to ask, who really disappeared from the cove that summer, begins to unspool. With Delia Blackwell's health failing and Dr. Maren Holt asking questions no one in Harrowgate wants answered, Seren realizes the town buried her family's past on purpose. The tide carried something out to sea the year she left, and it has been waiting, patient as grief, to be dragged back to shore. She can keep the silence that kept her safe, or she can break it open and risk losing the only man she ever loved a second time.