The Tidemark Trilogy Series by Sage Hayes

Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after. Miriam Vale is fifty-one years old and very good at being needed. She has the bookshop, the grown children who still call for everything, the father who has never figured out how to ring anyone else. She has managed herself into a life that is full in every way except the ways that matter... moreEach book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after. Miriam Vale is fifty-one years old and very good at being needed. She has the bookshop, the grown children who still call for everything, the father who has never figured out how to ring anyone else. She has managed herself into a life that is full in every way except the ways that matter. When her GP tells her to exercise, she joins the Dawn Sirens — a women's ocean-swimming collective that meets at Wylie's Baths before the city wakes. She does not expect the cold to crack something open. She does not expect Saskia Rohe. Saskia is forty-six, a marine biologist, and out since she was twenty-three. She is direct in the way of someone who stopped waiting for permission a long time ago. She notices Miriam noticing her, and she is interested — not as a project, not as a puzzle, as a person she wants to know better. But Saskia has been the patient one before, and she knows exactly how that story ends if the other woman never stops explaining her own desire away. The romance finds its shape in the ritual intimacy of pre-dawn swimming: cold water strips pretense, the open-air changing shed has no mirrors that flatter, and there is nowhere to hide the way your body actually moves when you think no one is watching. Miriam's struggle is not her family or her bookshop or the half-century she spent not knowing this about herself. It is the habit of reading desire as selfishness — the quiet, practiced belief that wanting something for herself is a thing she has to justify. Will she stop asking Saskia to wait while she decides whether she is allowed to want this? less

Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after. Petra Dawes is fifty-six years old and has spent eleven years watching people destroy each other in family court in the name of love. She has drawn her own conclusions. She swims with the Dawn Sirens because Miriam will not stop asking, and because the sea, at least, does not argue with her. She has not planned for Leila Costa... moreEach book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after. Petra Dawes is fifty-six years old and has spent eleven years watching people destroy each other in family court in the name of love. She has drawn her own conclusions. She swims with the Dawn Sirens because Miriam will not stop asking, and because the sea, at least, does not argue with her. She has not planned for Leila Costa. Leila is forty-five, broad-shouldered and warmly charismatic, a former professional footballer now running community sports programs on the Northern Beaches. She is also in the middle of a bruising divorce, co-parenting twin sixteen-year-olds who schedule their emotional crises without regard for anyone's calendar, and managing a shared custody arrangement with an ex-wife who appears at every school event. Leila is not looking for a relationship. She is barely managing the one she already has with her own life. She arrives at the Dawn Sirens' winter relay as a favour and ends up next to Petra in the water. That is where the trouble starts. Both women are out. Neither is confused about what the pull between them means. The problem is that Leila's life — the noise, the teenagers, the ex-wife, the permanent, unpredictable domestic present — is exactly what Petra has spent years constructing her own life to exclude. And Leila has been deferring her own needs for sixteen years, postponing desire until everyone else is settled, which means she has been postponing it since she can remember. Petra has always chosen the clean version of things. Leila is offering the actual version. Is order really the same thing as wisdom? less

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... moreEach 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? less