Length8h 35m
About this audiobook
Port Mayflower makes its living off the water and its judgements on the wharf, and it has had sixteen years to form an opinion about the woman who owns the Sea Rose.
That gull, the same one every morning, the one missing a primary feather on its left wing, has chosen the foredeck again. Cordelia Shaw presses the bristle brush into the grain of the planking and works the dried mess loose, the ammonia reek of salt and seabird cutting through fog that still clings to the wharves.
Sixteen years of scrubbing and caulking and asking bankers for patience, and the gull still finds new places to foul.
The scar along her left jaw pulls tight when she bends. A mainsheet block came loose in a nor'easter and caught her face before Theophilus could haul her clear. Alice was three then, asleep below in the hanging cot while her mother bled into the scuppers and prayed it would stop before morning.
Then a woman steps onto the deck proper, boots finding purchase on a rolling hull like she has done it before.
*Who the hell are you?*
*Lena Vane. I'm a marine artist. I've come to paint your vessel.*
*You've got no business on my ship. Get off.*
*I have a letter.*
There is a locket, and a sketchbook labelled with this harbour and a summer nearly twenty years gone, and a mother who came here once and never explained why. There is a storm that scours things clean and a mast that gives up a confession nobody asked it for. There is a warning from the harbour master delivered in the voice men use when they are being kind about something cruel.
And there is a letter that proves a woman in this town broke her marriage vows, held up in front of a crowd that is happy to have somewhere to put its feeling.
*She was beautiful. She was home.*
What it costs Cordelia is the arrangement she has kept with this port for sixteen years: they tolerate her, and in exchange she never asks for anything. What it costs Lena is the version of her mother she came here carrying, which turns out to have been assembled out of the parts nobody wanted to talk about.
A nineteenth-century coastal romance between two women, with a schooner, a daughter, a town, and no possibility of doing this quietly.
Audiobook details
GenreRomance, Biography and Memoir
Length8 hrs 35 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 15, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Dedication
2Chapter 1 - The Uninvited Canvas
3Chapter 2 - A Shorebird’s View
4Chapter 3 - The Weight of a Name
5Chapter 4 - The Storm That Cleans
Show all chaptersShow less
6Chapter 5 - The Mast’s Confession
7Chapter 6 - The Harbor Master’s Warning
8Chapter 7 - The Lie We Tell Children
9Chapter 8 - The Artist’s Bargain
10Chapter 9 - The Knot That Holds
11Chapter 10 - The Daughter’s Bargain
12Chapter 11 - The Underneath of Things
13Chapter 12 - The Portrait That Remembers
14Chapter 13 - The Recollection of Fire
15Chapter 14 - The Price of Knowing
16Chapter 15 - The Broken Seal
17Chapter 16 - The Half-True Confession
18Chapter 17 - The Stolen Proof
19Chapter 18 - The Race of Ash and Salt
20Chapter 19 - The Unspoken Oath
21Chapter 20 - The Confession That Costs
22Chapter 21 - The Embers We Kindle
23Chapter 22 - The Tide That Carries
24Chapter 23 - The Letter We Never Send
25Chapter 24 - The Harbor That Welcomes
26Chapter 25 - The End of the Mooring Line
27Epilogue
28About the Author
29The End
30About the Author
31Also by Casey Bell
32Acknowledgements
33A Note from the Author
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