Fiction

Fourteen months after the funeral, Elle drives six hours to sell the house that still smells like her husband. She has been coming to it for thirty-one years and has never once walked down the staircase to the cove below, and she has never told anyone why. On the porch she finds Adam Hale, who has spent thirty-four years driving the long way round so he would not have to look at that same stretch of sand.

A novel about a second chance at fifty-three, and about the difference between a house you are keeping out of obligation and one you have chosen.

The last line on a list her father left in a drawer reads: Teach C to varnish. Claire spends a summer in the town where her widowed mother started over, learning a craft from the man who is now in her father’s place, and working out which parts of the life she is sliding into are actually hers.