THE TIDE BETWEEN US

Maggie Rhodes has spent nine years keeping the water out of the Cooper’s Landing Inn — raising her son, Dean, in the old house on the Newport River and scraping together the money for her father’s care. When the inn’s owner dies, the will leaves the place to two people: half to Maggie, and half to Beck Callahan, the builder who loaded his truck and drove to Charlotte ten years ago and never came back.

The will has a condition. The storm-wrecked inn must be open for business in ninety days, or it will be sold. A developer named Royce Dunbar has wanted the eleven acres for six years, and he has quietly bought the bank note on the property — a hundred and four thousand dollars, due on Valentine’s Day. If Maggie and Beck fail, he tears the house down and builds fourteen homes on the point.

Beck comes back for a building. He stays for a leaking roof, a rotten dock, a town that has not forgiven him, and a nine-year-old boy who keeps tide tables in a notebook and looks at him with a face Beck has seen in the mirror. Maggie has something to tell him and has never found the day to say it. And the woman who left them the inn also left three sealed letters with her lawyer — the last to be opened only when the two of them have stopped lying to each other.

THE TIDE BETWEEN US is a second-chance love story set on the North Carolina coast, about a house worth saving, a secret kept ten years too long, and what it costs a man to come home and stay.