Chasing Sunsets

A widowed painter looking for a place to land. A lighthouse keeper with reasons to stay alone. And a secret the past has been keeping for both of them.

Heath Dutton has spent three years moving. Three years since he lost his wife Katherine. Three years of new cities, new beaches, new sketchbooks, and no front door he could call his own. The little red cottage on the marsh in Seagrove is supposed to change that. A place to unpack. A place to stay. A place to figure out who he is now that he isn't moving anymore.

Emma keeps the lighthouse and a polite distance from the rest of the world. She has a rescue terrier named Walter, a quiet routine, and a reason she doesn't carry a badge anymore. The kind of reason you don't tell strangers, no matter how kind their eyes are.

When Heath and Emma start trading dinners so neither has to eat alone, the friendship grows faster than either of them planned. He gives her a painting he says was meant to be hers. She lets him in on the kind of pain she usually keeps locked up tight. And somewhere between the marsh tours and the quiet meals, Heath starts to feel something he was sure he'd buried for good. Then a question he thought he'd put to bed years ago shows up in Seagrove with answers he was never expecting.

Meanwhile, Colleen comes home from a Vegas business trip with a ring on her finger and a story she can't quite figure out how to tell her mother. SuAnn lands the cover of Sassy Southern Magazine. Dixie picks up a tennis racket. Meg makes a decision that surprises everyone but her. And in a quiet bathroom at the Summer Kickoff festival, one little plus sign rewrites somebody's whole summer.

This is Seagrove at its softest. Old wounds. New love. And one more reminder that the people who heal you sometimes find you when you finally stop running.