What the Tide Keeps (The Tidemark Trilogy #3)
Sage Hayes
Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after.
Everyone in the Dawn Sirens trusts Juniper Kerr. She founded the collective twelve years ago. She is first into the water and last out. She knows who is struggling before they know it themselves, and she is funny enough to make fear look like ordinary courage. She has never learned how to be the one who is held.
At sixty-three, arthritis has begun to renegotiate her relationship with the sea. She is not sure who she is in the water if she is not the strongest swimmer in it. She has not told anyone this.
Orla Sweeney arrives at Wylie's Baths eight months after finishing treatment for breast cancer. She is fifty-five, an investigative journalist whose sharpness is famous, and she cannot stand the sympathy of her regular life for one more minute. She is not looking for tenderness. She is not planning to want anyone. She particularly does not plan to want someone who watches her like she has been waiting, and who makes Orla feel, for the first time since surgery, like her body might still belong to her.
The attraction between them is immediate and profoundly inconvenient. Juniper hides vulnerability behind competence and humor so practiced that she has almost forgotten there is anything underneath. Orla is certain that her post-cancer body — the scars, the asymmetry, the places where sensation never returned — has reclassified her into the category of woman who receives kindness instead of desire.
They understand each other with uncomfortable precision and keep that understanding at a safe distance for as long as they can.
The final book in The Tidemark Trilogy closes on the whole community — the Dawn Sirens, the chosen family, the people Juniper spent years creating a home for before she knew she needed one. What is left when the invincible woman finally stops performing?
