Letters She Wrote | Outer Banks

𝐄𝐗𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐃 𝐒𝐔𝐌𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐘

❝Letters are among
the most significant
memorial
a person can leave
behind them.❞

FROM THE MOMENT OF her traumatic birth, Willa Deveraux's fate had been decided for her. And from that day on, her world was no longer her own.

Adopted into a family of five other unperfect children and two otherwise dollhouse perfect parents, Willa despised the forced and overwhelming riches of her future that threatened to overrun the rags of her forgotten roots. She hated what had become of her life without having a choice in her own direction, seemingly fated to watch her tragic lonely undoing.  It was not fair.  The world should have been hers, but because of a married rich couple, her peace was stolen from her. 

Willa should have been grateful that mere strangers had wanted to give her a better life in the paradise that was the Outer Banks of North Carolina, sure. But she wasn't.  For in the eyes of a malicious society run by mansions, balls, and cocktails, Willa was thought to be a luxurious "kook"—but behind closed doors, Willa heard the cruel whispers of her nasty neighbors spewing that she was truly nothing more than a tainted kook, twisted with "pogue" tendencies.

Too deep of a wallet to be a pogue but too dirty of a background to be a kook, Willa was no pure blood Deveraux. She did not fit within the expectations of Outer Banks reputations and she no longer wanted to be apart of it. But there was no running from her North Carolina hellhole until her eighteenth birthday, when she could finally, and legally, break free of her restricting parents' holds on her tampered soul. And so, all Willa could do was wait and—like any other teenager—rebel in any way that she knew possible. Through endless piss beers, horrendously rolled joints, and disastrously spent paychecks, Willa was counting down the days until her senior graduation, where she could finally escape her haunted hometown and restart her life to live the way she believed it was truly meant to be lived.

But on a fateful summer night, nearing the eve of her junior year, Willa takes a risk unbeknownst to even herself when she knocks a loaded gun out of the hands of a reckless, drunken blonde at a party. And whether Willa likes it or not, before the weapon can dare touch the sand beneath her feet, she is pulled into the heart of a murderous mystery involving a missing father and a legendary treasure. Now hunted by the law and eternally bounded to strangers—Willa's classmates—who she otherwise would not have dared to speak to in their shared school hallways, Willa must finally put her dreams of running away aside and face her deadly reality. And amongst the bloodshed and bullets, and the heaps of buried gold and salty marsh water, Willa unexpectedly finds comfort in the strangest of places—and in the strangest of arms, too.

For Willa Deveraux, maybe home was a lot closer than she had thought. Maybe it had been standing right in front of her all along . . .

❝It's very rare to have known you,
very strange and beautiful.❞