The Last Good Summer

A box of ashes. A letter naming an island she's never seen. One sandbar that surfaces only at low tide.

For six years, Nora Quinn's life belonged to her mother. Early-onset Alzheimer's took the woman slowly, one memory at a time, until the travel photographer who once shot sunrises on five continents hadn't lifted a camera in years. Now her mother is gone, and Nora is carrying two things she doesn't know what to do with: a small box of ashes, and the guilt of feeling something dangerously close to relief.

Among her mother's things, she finds a letter. It names Seagrove Island, and one specific sandbar reachable only at low tide, as the site of the happiest day of her mother's life. It's where she asked to be returned.

Ford Hartley is the only charter captain willing to make the run. A widower raising a seven-year-old daughter named Hattie, Ford knows a different kind of grief than Nora does. He lost his wife in an instant, with no goodbye. Nora lost her mother slowly, twice over, grieving the woman long before she was truly gone. Two opposite shapes of the same wound.

What was meant to be one trip out to the sandbar becomes a whole season. Because the more of her mother's long-ago summer that Nora retraces on Seagrove, the more she realizes she never knew the woman at all. There's a weathered cottage her mother once rented. A face on the island who remembers her. A version of her mother that existed before Nora ever did, and a secret about this place that turns everything she thought she knew about where she came from upside down.

For anyone who has loved someone all the way to the end and then wondered who they get to be afterward, The Last Good Summer is a tender, hopeful story about grief, second beginnings, and the slow work of finding your way back to yourself. Set in the beloved coastal world of Seagrove.