
Book One · Winter
The Inn at Larkspur Harbor
Claire, 61 & Jack, 63
Three sisters. One year. And the old inn on the coast of Maine their mother never stopped loving.
At sixty-one, Boston trusts lawyer Claire Chadbourne has made a career of reading the fine print, so she knows exactly what her late mother is asking. To inherit the Larkspur Inn, Claire and her two very different sisters must run it together for one full year. There is a tax bill due in April that none of them can pay, a front porch falling down, and a letter in her mother's handwriting with one puzzling instruction: ask about the larkspur.
Jack Ferrell is the widowed carpenter her mother hired to finish that porch. He is quiet, patient and loyal to a fault, and he plainly knows more about her mother's last years than Claire does. He is also the last thing she needs. Claire came to Maine to keep the terms on paper, sell in a year and go home.
But a Maine winter has plans of its own. A blizzard and a dead boiler. A corporate buyer with a generous offer. A town that remembers the Chadbourne girls far better than they remember it. And every morning at six-thirty, coffee on the porch with a man who has started building her mother's steps as if he means them to last.








