THE MAPLE BEACH HOUSE

Her husband had a second address. Her signature was on the debt.For twenty years Camille Laurent has smoothed things over: the missing kettle, the unpaid bills, the polite excuses she writes for other people. Then one September morning she reads the fine print. By the end of the month she has left her marriage and put her grandmother's inheritance into the first thing she has ever wanted for herself: a weather-beaten cedar house at the end of a gravel road on Vancouver Island, and the drowned seaside library that comes with it.Maple Beach has been waiting. So has a plastic card wedged under the storefront door, bearing the name of a man the file calls "e;unidentified,"e; who died inside four winters ago.Owen Tsang, the dry-humoured carpenter hired to keep her from falling through the floor, learned the hard way what happens when a warning goes unread. He knows better than to trust a building, or his own heart, with something this fragile. But he cannot walk away from a man's bed made with square corners and a note pinned at eye height: He was waiting for someone.With a stubborn cat, a café full of opinions, and a town that has kept a very polite silence, Cam and Owen set out to learn who Marcus Bell was, who he was waiting for, and why nobody came.Warm as a woodstove and honest as a ledger, The Maple Beach House is a slow-burn, clean romance about second chances, found community, and what we owe the people our records forgot.