Beneath the Salt Air

A tender, emotional coastal women's-fiction novel about family secrets, a long-buried inheritance, grief, reinvention, hidden parentage, and a homecoming that changes everythingBy Josephine V. Wainwright

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Length7h 25m

About this audiobook

The casket was closed, and no one would tell Clara why. Eleven years ago, Clara left Harbor's End and never looked back. She built a life in Portland. A career. A version of herself her grandmother never approved of. Now Lena is dead, and Clara has driven six hours through rain and regret for a funeral she arrived too late to attend. She remembers the smell of sawdust and sea glass. She remembers a grandmother sharp enough to say, "You're making a mistake," and be right. She remembers everything except the truth. Because there is a teenage girl at the reception watching her across the room. A girl named Ruby. A spray of freckles. Eyes the exact green-gold of Clara's dead mother, the mother she lost at six months old and only knows from photographs. A girl wearing the gold locket Clara was forbidden to open as a child, the one that holds the face of a man she was told was her grandfather. "She gave it to me," Ruby says. "Before she died. She said I should have it." When Clara asks why, the girl only smiles. "You tell me." Then the questions start piling up faster than the casseroles. There is a brass key taped beneath a kitchen drawer, the kind that opens a lock older than Clara is. There is a cottage that Tessa, with her too-bright coral nails, is desperate to sell before anyone starts asking what it's worth. There is a realtor already waiting, and a timeline nobody will explain. And there is Quinn Delaney, the gruff, weathered gardener who tended Lena's beloved restoration project, who read eleven years of letters Clara never knew were written, and who clearly knows far more than he is willing to say. Every locked door in this town leads back to the same secret. To claim what her grandmother left behind, Clara will have to stop running from the place that made her and finally open the door her family kept sealed for three decades. But some inheritances are made of secrets. And some truths, once unearthed, can never be buried again. Beneath the Salt Air is a tender, emotional coastal women's-fiction novel about family secrets, a long-buried inheritance, grief, reinvention, hidden parentage, and a homecoming that changes everything. Perfect for readers who love seaside family sagas, secrets-and-lies women's fiction, slow-burn small-town reckonings, and the heart of Colleen Hoover and Elin Hilderbrand. A standalone novel with a hopeful, hard-won ending.

Family Mystery Hidden Identity Identity Grief Small Town Healing