Against the Tide

Twenty years is a long time to hold your breath. For Rebecca, life in the city was a masterpiece of "safe" choices. She had a high-profile husband, beautiful children, and a life polished to a mirror shine. But when the golden veneer of her marriage shatters—leaving her with a broken heart and a son who looks at her with his father’s cold eyes—she retreats to the only place left: her mother’s decaying estate in the humid, salt-crusted Lowcountry of South Carolina. She expected to settle the estate and run. She didn't expect Brady Gray. As the local Harbormaster, Brady is a man made of salt, silence, and secrets. He is the "dock boy" she left behind in 2003—the one who was too loud, too rough, and too much of a storm for a girl looking for an easy path. While Rebecca was building a life of silk and pearls a thousand miles away, Brady was the silent sentry, boarding up her mother’s windows through a decade of hurricanes and waiting for a tide that might never come in. Now, trapped together on the deck of the Juniper, the masks of the past are beginning to fail. To the town, she is the "Golden Girl" who ran; to her husband, she is a trophy to be reclaimed or broken; but to Brady, she is the only fire worth the burn. As a literal storm brews over the Atlantic, Rebecca must decide if she is brave enough to stop being the woman everyone expects her to be. In a world that values the "Safe Choice," can she find the strength to drop anchor in the mud, or will the weight of twenty years of secrets finally pull them under? In the south, the tide always returns. The only question is what it leaves behind.