The Season We Came Home: A Clean Small-Town Romance

Two people who each think they killed their best friend. One summer to learn they were both wrong. Ten years ago, Edie Marlow and Cal Shea were Salt Harbor's golden couple - until the night their best friend, Wren, drowned in a boating accident the evening of their high-school graduation. Each of them fled the downeast Maine fishing town, and each other, certain the blame was theirs to carry alone. Now Edie is back: widowed young, broke, running her late husband's failing diner through one last summer because she has nowhere else to go. And Cal is back: the town's new paramedic, a recovering alcoholic who took the job to come home without admitting why. Neither knows the other still carries the guilt. Neither has the true story of the night that broke them - a story only Wren's grieving mother, holding the last piece, can finally give them. Across one Maine summer - the four-forty-five flat-top mornings, the lobster-roll lunch rush, the church suppers and the slow walk to the grave - the two of them piece together a decade of silence. What they discover is that the guilt they've been poisoning themselves with was never theirs to carry, and that forgiveness isn't something you earn. It's something you stop refusing. A clean, dual-POV second-chance romance about coming home, hard-won sobriety, and the courage it takes to stay in the one place you've spent ten years running from. For readers of Kristan Higgins, RaeAnne Thayne, and Robyn Carr.