Almost to Shore

Avelmere Shores carries everything—storms, secrets, and the people it couldn’t save.

Its grief seeps into the fog and tide pools, and Liona Rosa has always felt it. A domestic-violence advocate who sometimes struggles to know where helping ends and overstepping begins, she reads the town’s moods in the wind, its warnings in the hush before rain. Some call it intuition. Some call it a gift, carried through generations. Perhaps it is something deeper and buried.

When Bree Moore disappears after a party, Detective John Lloyd begins piecing together the final hours before she vanished. Clues surface, suspicions grow, and the investigation reaches into the lives of those connected to Bree—and eventually into Liona’s own family.

Among those drawn into the investigation is Liona’s son, Abel, a young EMT and former lifeguard more accustomed to saving people than being questioned about them. A lifetime of too many losses has left him carrying things he rarely speaks about. When his connection to Bree comes to light, the young man people know and trust suddenly finds himself under suspicion.

For Liona, the investigation is impossible to keep at a distance. Her sense that something is wrong grows stronger, even as Abel pushes against her need to protect him. Mother and son share a fierce bond, but also a complicated history shaped by trauma neither has fully healed from. As old wounds surface, each is forced to confront what has been left unspoken between them.

Meanwhile, a domestic-violence case pulls Liona to cross boundaries she once vowed to keep. What begins as an effort to help a woman in danger draws her deeper into a web of secrecy and control—and closer to danger than she realizes.

With a storm gathering offshore, Liona’s instincts grow harder to ignore. Something is coming—and what she senses may be a matter of life and death.

As the search for Bree draws Liona, Abel, and Lloyd toward truths that refuse to stay buried, the line between intuition and the explainable begins to blur.

Avelmere—watching with centuries of secrets—knows that every truth eventually rises, like a tide breaking through.