She spent thirty-one years guarding the past. She never once let anybody light a lamp for her.

At fifty-nine, Verna Sikes keeps the whole of Carrabelle's memory: a hundred years of names, a card catalog built by hand, and an old net-camp landing on the tannin-dark river where the oyster boats still go out at first light. She keeps everything but the one box on her top shelf, the one marked with her late husband's name, the one she has never had the courage to open. And she has spent all thirty-one years since the state closed Wade's oyster lease quietly blaming the young marine-patrol officer who worked the closure: Odell Fry.

Now a developer wants the landing for a boat ramp, with a channel dredged straight through the public oyster bars, and the only man who can prove those bars are alive is the very man Verna has kept at the far end of a weigh floor for three decades. To save the landing they will have to stand side by side-and Verna will have to find out what Odell has quietly been doing out on the dark water, for love of her family, for thirty years, and never once said.

First Light is a sweet, clean, slow-burn later-in-life second-chance romance: the story of the love you almost argue yourself right out of, a beloved working waterfront worth fighting for, and two stubborn hearts who learn it is never too late to be wanted out loud. No spice, and a guaranteed happily-ever-after. The final book of the Carrabelle series.