Letters To The Sea

Zora Baptiste came home to bury her grandmother. Instead, she inherited a house, six months she never agreed to, and thirty years of family secrets. After building a carefully controlled life in Miami, Zora returns to the Caribbean island of Sainte Calista for her grandmother Dora's funeral. She plans to stay only long enough to survive the relatives, the rum-soaked mourning, and the memories waiting inside Sea Grape House.
Then the will is read. The house belongs to Zora-but only if she lives there until the Moon Tide Festival six months away. Should she leave early or attempt to sell it, the property will pass to her powerful uncle Calvin, who is already negotiating with developers determined to transform the family's beloved bay into a luxury resort. As Zora settles into the crumbling house, she begins finding messages left behind by her grandmother: a brass key hidden beneath sugar cubes, mysterious blue envelopes, an old deed, and one devastating confession.
Her mother did not abandon her. Dora made sure she left. The answers lead Zora back to the storm that divided her childhood, a fisherman who disappeared without a body, and a family that has mistaken silence for protection for far too long. Everyone on Sainte Calista seems to know part of the story-including Micah Laurent, the man Zora loved before she decided leaving the island was the only way to survive it.
While Calvin pressures her to surrender the property, Zora must uncover what happened to her parents, determine whether Sea Grape Bay was illegally taken from the community, and decide what she owes the home she once blamed for everything. But the closer she gets to the truth, the more complicated the past becomes. Her grandmother's protection carried a price. Her mother's absence was not as simple as abandonment.
And the people Zora has spent years resenting may have been surviving dangers she was too young to understand. Sharp, emotional, romantic, and filled with Caribbean warmth and humor, Letters to the Sea is a powerful novel about family secrets, inherited silence, second chances, community, grief, and the difficult journey of returning home without becoming the person you were when you left. Sometimes the sea carries our secrets away.
Sometimes it brings them back.