All the Salt We Carry

Tully Brooks came home to bury a ghost, not to fall in love with one. A decade after he traded the salt air of his childhood for international assignments and a career built on beautiful distances, Tully returns to the Anchor Inn to photograph its collapsing eastern gable for a magazine spread, and finds Maren Ashford standing in the doorway, hand braced against the frame as though she has been waiting there for years. Their history is a wound neither of them has stopped reopening, and the inheritance Hugh Ashford left behind threatens to reopen it for good. The inn, the coastline, and the family's tangled claim to both now rest on a decision Maren is not sure she can make alone, while Tully's editor expects him back in the city by week's end. As the peeling shingles give way and long-buried letters surface in the attic, Lettie Mae Brookes, Dory Henning, and the rest of the harbor's old loyalties begin to take sides. With the Anchor facing foreclosure, an offer from developer Oren Vance dangling over the deed, and Camille Lassiter pressing for answers no one wants to give, Tully must choose between the career that lets him keep running and the woman who has always been his reason to stay.