Leaving the Isle of Palms: A Novel Love, Risk and Courage to Change Course

Love was never supposed to pull her out to sea. Callie Russell has spent her whole life on the Isle of Palms, a barrier island girl who knows every grain of sand, every barstool at the Windjammer, and every unspoken expectation that comes with staying put. Fresh out of college, freshly dumped, and sinking under the weight of a life that already feels too small, she is one reckless night away from a course correction she never saw coming. When a blue-eyed stranger with no shoes and no roots crashes into her world, something shifts beneath the surface. Matt Aubrey is a Naval Academy midshipman who lives by tides and weather windows. The summer of 1988 finds him chasing horizons aboard his best friend's sailboat, Tangier Dream. He is everything the safe, familiar island is not: unpredictable, magnetic, and just dangerous enough to leave a mark. When an undeniable connection pulls Callie and Matt together, what begins as an escape from heartbreak becomes a thousand-mile voyage from Charleston Harbor, through the Bahamas, and the wild, remote waters of the Turks and Caicos. Paradise opens around them, but so does something far deeper than either expected. But freedom has a price. What starts as passion and possibility turns perilous, and the farther they sail from everything Callie has known, the higher the stakes climb. Some journeys help you grow. Some make sure you never come back the same. The only question is whether Callie and Matt will survive the one thing more dangerous than the open ocean: each other.