ISBN-13: 9781542032599

ISBN-10: 1542032598

Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE RUTH

CHAPTER ONE IVY

CHAPTER TWO IVY

CHAPTER THREE IVY

CHAPTER FOUR RUTH

CHAPTER FIVE IVY

CHAPTER SIX IVY

CHAPTER SEVEN RUTH

CHAPTER EIGHT IVY

CHAPTER NINE RUTH

CHAPTER TEN IVY

CHAPTER ELEVEN IVY

CHAPTER TWELVE ANN

CHAPTER THIRTEEN RUTH

CHAPTER FOURTEEN IVY

CHAPTER FIFTEEN IVY

CHAPTER SIXTEEN DANI

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CARLOTTA

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN RUTH

CHAPTER NINETEEN RUTH

CHAPTER TWENTY IVY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE IVY

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO IVY

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE IVY

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR RUTH

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE RUTH

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX CARLOTTA

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN IVY

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT IVY

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE IVY

CHAPTER THIRTY EDNA

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE IVY

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO IVY

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE RUTH

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR IVY

EPILOGUE IVY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PROLOGUE

RUTH

Nags Head, North Carolina

Sunday, January 2, 2022, 8:00 a.m.

Off these shores, the Atlantic Ocean is greedy. She swallows ships, goods, men, and hungrily guards her treasures and mysteries. Days, months, centuries can pass without a whisper of truth, and then smooth waters crackle, briny depths churn, and somewhere deep below the surface, a grip slackens, and a secret is revealed.

Now, standing on the shore before dawn’s untethered sky, Ruth could feel the looming change in her eighty-four-year-old bones. She huddled deeper into her coat, warming her arthritic fingers as sunlight burst above pale clouds ferried along the horizon by cold, salty winds.

“No one saw the storm coming but us, Mama,” Ruth said to herself. “I felt it like you once could.” None of the news stations had forecast that depressions off the African coast would head west, mingle with the warm waters of the Caribbean, and snap free as a Cat 4 storm. No one had expected evacuations so late in the hurricane season. And no one had predicted the damage.

Ruth had wanted to ride out the storm, but the sheriff had ordered her out. She’d argued but, in the end, let him drive her over the Wright Memorial Bridge to the mainland, where she’d spent a long night in the Currituck County High School gym with hundreds of others. Worries over the damage swirled in the crowd as winds howled and lights flickered.

Funny thing was, Ruth hadn’t been worried. Annoyed, sure, but not anxious. She’d known before she’d left her cottage that her hotel, the Seaside Resort, wasn’t going to survive. Like her, it had run its course. Their time had passed.

Her family had owned and managed the Seaside Resort for over one hundred years. Her daddy liked to brag that he’d won it in a card game, but the place hadn’t been much until Mama had seen fit to marry him and take charge of him and the resort’s day-to-day operations. On this day in 1938, she was born in Bungalow 28, which once boasted the best ocean view in the entire place. As the story goes, her mama found Ruth wrapped in a pink blanket, with no sign of the woman who’d given birth to her.