When the Tide Pulls Back

Brynn Calloway hasn't slept through the night in three months.

Since her sister's death, she's been treading water - literally. Every morning before dawn, she drags herself into the freezing Atlantic off a North Carolina barrier island, daring the cold to drown out everything she can't say. She catalogs water samples at a marine research station, eats granola bars over the sink, and keeps her dead sister's face as her phone lock screen because changing it would mean something she's not ready to mean.

She didn't come to Inlet Cove to heal. She came because Margot - her sister's widow - left the guesthouse door open, and Brynn had nowhere else to go.

Then there's Hollis. Bright, warm, impossible-to-ignore Hollis, who leads lighthouse tours with her whole body and laughs like she's been told something wonderful. She is everything Brynn has been flinching away from: connection, joy, the terrifying possibility that the world might still hold something worth reaching for.

When the Tide Pulls Back is a luminous sapphic romance about two women learning that grief doesn't have to be carried alone - and that love, like the ocean, has a way of returning.