The Second Season

She spent twenty-six years granting other people's wishes. Then a dying stranger granted hers.

Grace Delaney is the best concierge in New York - the woman who finds violinists at midnight and rooms that don't exist. When the grand Hotel Marchand closes forever, Grace, fifty-two and widowed, is left with a severance check, an empty apartment, and no idea who she is without a desk to stand behind.

Then a letter arrives from Portugal. You will not remember me, but you once found a violinist for my wife.

Arthur Bellamy, eighty years old and dying, has one final request: help him reopen the Hotel Palácio da Maré - the shuttered palace on the Atlantic cliffs of Cascais that his family kept for a century - for one last season. One year. Done properly, or not at all.

What Grace finds on that headland is a house full of ghosts and loyalists: a waiter who has served tea at four o'clock for sixty years, a widowed chef who courts her one vegetable crate at a time, a town that never stopped setting a place for the hotel that raised it - and a predatory resort group circling with a debt that comes due on New Year's Eve.

To save the Palácio, Grace will need every favor she ever banked, every guest she ever treated as a beloved, and the one skill no spreadsheet can price: knowing what people need before they ask.

She came for one season. She stayed for the rest of her life.

For readers of Danielle Steel, Rosamunde Pilcher, and Susan Mallery - a sweeping, tender novel about grief, grand hotels, found family, and the love that arrives when the tomatoes are ready.