by Anita Shreve
First published 2010
Peter Webster responds to his first emergency call as a rookie paramedic and pulls Sheila Arsenault from her wrecked vehicle. The streetwise woman with fierce desires captivates the straightforward Webster completely. They marry quickly and have a daughter named Rowan. Their whirlwind romance crashes as suddenly as it began when Sheila abandons the family. Webster spends eighteen years raising Rowan alone, but now his teenage daughter spirals toward trouble. His paramedic work exposes him daily to every way life can go wrong in an instant. All his paternal love seems insufficient to protect Rowan from danger. When Sheila unexpectedly returns after nearly two decades, her arrival threatens to unleash years of accumulated questions, resentment, and unfulfilled longing. Webster must confront whether you can truly rescue another person and face what originally destroyed his young family.
Genres: romance, literary-fiction, contemporary-romance, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: second-chance, unreliable-narrator
288 pages · Hardcover · Little, Brown and Company