A Cherry Point Summers Romance · Book One
Nine years away. Ninety-three days to come home.
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A second chance nine years in the making — and a goodbye letter she could never bring herself to finish.
A foreclosure clock, a grandmother's sourdough starter still alive in the freezer, and ninety-three days to save it all.
Wooden boats, a town that remembers, and a man who learned that waiting can be its own form of work.
The story
Joss Marchetti left Cherry Point, Michigan the summer she turned nineteen — left her grandfather's struggling bakery, her family, and Theo Brennan, the boatbuilder she loved, holding a goodbye letter she could never bring herself to finish.
Nine years later, Brooklyn pastry chef Joss returns for ninety-three days. It's a professional visit: the bakery faces foreclosure in sixty days, and the Cherry Point Regatta has no one to run it. She will stay, she will fix what broke, and she will leave again before the summer ends.
The problem is Theo. He's still at the boat works across the harbor, still building by hand, still arriving at five in the morning the way he always did.
"Waiting can be its own form of work."
Ninety-three days isn't enough time to fix a foreclosure, resurrect a regatta, or rebuild a life left behind. But maybe it's enough time to understand why she ran in the first place — and to find out whether coming home is the same as staying.
Read the opening
Diesel, rotting dock rope, cold lake water. The specific compound of Whisper Cove Marina at 6:18 in the morning, the same compound at every 6:18 of every morning since I was old enough to walk down here on my own. I know it the way I know the inside of my ribcage. I do not let myself say that yet. I put the duffel down, I look at the dock, I say: I am here for the bakery.
My flight landed in Traverse City at 11:04 PM. I slept three hours at the Airport Inn and drove the rental an hour north in the dark. I have ninety-three days.
The dock smells the way it smelled at nineteen. I stop the thought before it finishes…
About the author
Mara Henley writes warm, witty summer romances set in the small lake towns of the Great Lakes — places where the lighthouse keepers remember your grandmother by name, the bakery still sells the same lemon-blueberry tarts it did when you were seventeen, and the boy you left behind has been building boats by hand for ten years.
When Mara isn't writing, she's reading on a screened-in porch, drinking iced coffee that's mostly cream, and pretending she knows how to sail. She lives somewhere along the Great Lakes shoreline.