She built a life out of what remained. She didn't expect to want more.
Nora Callahan has run Callahan Books for seventeen years - first with her husband Patrick, then alone. Six years after his death, she has made her solitude into something she tends with care. The shop, the reading group, the harbour walks, the lamp she leaves burning in the back room. It is sufficient. It is good. She is not lonely in the way people imagine she must be.
Then a research vessel she doesn't recognise moors at the working dock, and a marine ecologist named Daniel Reeves walks into her shop looking for books on coastal ecology.
He comes back for the one he didn't buy the first time.
Everything the Tide Brings Back is a slow-burn story about a woman at forty-nine learning to want something again - not instead of grief, but alongside it. Set in the coastal Maine town of Seabrook Cove across one autumn and winter, it follows Nora and Daniel through the particular intimacy of two people who know how to pay attention, and what happens when the paying of attention becomes something neither of them can talk themselves out of.
For readers who believe the most romantic thing a person can do is come back.
The second book in the Seabrook Cove Stories series. Can be read as a standalone.
