She hadn’t expected him to follow her. In a drunken rage, he’d struck her down as she tried to escape up the stairs. Howling with fury, he hit her, again and again, as her mother and brother watched, frozen in terror in the front hall. Cara still remembered his lips, tight with a line of spittle. His eyes, glazed red with fury. The slap of his hand across her face. Yet she did not remember the pain. It was as though she were numb, unable to feel. What she remembered most clearly as the blows came was staring at her mother, meeting her gaze in a silent challenge: Why aren’t you stopping him?

By dawn, she’d left the house, her family, Charleston, all she knew, to head to any point north. It was an act of survival. She’d ended up in Chicago with nothing but the clothes in her suitcase and a few thousand dollars in her bank account. A cousin living there had let her crash in her apartment. Once her bruises healed, Cara went out in search of a job. She was hired as a receptionist for an advertising firm. She worked during the day and took college classes at night. It had taken seven years, but she got her bachelor’s degree and, in the following years, rose up the ladder to become one of the youngest executives at the firm.

At forty, Cara had achieved all she had set out to do when she’d left her family that horrid night. And in the blink of an eye—or rather, a financial shift of power—she’d lost it all. She was summarily fired. There was a particular kind of humiliation associated with being escorted out of the building by an armed guard.

Staring out the window of her Chicago condo at a stormy Lake Michigan, with her mother’s letter begging her to come home for a visit in her hand, Cara had the cold realization that in all those years focusing on work and success, she had forgotten to live. Gazing at the threatening water, she’d faced the fact that she had no real friends, no relationship, and, at forty, no children.

Cara had never felt so utterly alone. Used up. Depleted. Picking herself up, she went where most children went when the world kicked them to the ground—home. Her father was dead, opening the door in her mind to reconciliation with her mother. Once again, her life had changed, and she had to start over. It wasn’t easy. She’d spent the past twenty years carefully crafting her world and her response to it. Her mother had named her Caretta after the loggerhead sea turtles she adored. Cara had always hated it, choosing to be called Cara. Yet she’d adopted the signature lone-swimmer lifestyle of the turtle for which she’d been named.

Back in the lowcountry, settling into her mother’s beach house, Cara had learned in small increments, year after year, to give up her life as a lone swimmer and instead to join a family that not only welcomed but loved her. She’d opened herself to love and, to her great surprise, found it in Brett Beauchamps. Her first husband had been the love of her life, and for ten years they had been happy. Their one serious hurdle had been their inability to have children, though they’d tried one in vitro effort after another. The harsh reality that confronted her was that she’d simply waited too long. And then Brett was gone. Once again, Cara was alone.