The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter

When her grandmother dies and leaves her a crumbling house on the Maine coast, Margaux Aldridge plans to sell it, sign the papers, and go straight back to the careful, untouchable life she's built four hundred miles away. She doesn't plan on the porch needing saving by a quiet, unhurried man next door who fixes things for pie and never once asks what he's owed in return.
She doesn't plan on her parents showing up to claim the house as their own. She doesn't plan on the watercolors in the attic, or on letting herself want something - someone - without first calculating the cost of wanting it.
And she certainly doesn't plan on Clara: beautiful, pregnant, and utterly convinced that a girl like Margaux was never anything more than a way for a wealthy man to pass the time. When a paternity test turns Margaux's whole understanding of the man she loves upside down, she has to decide what she actually believes - and what she's willing to risk believing it.
A slow-burn coastal romance about inheritance, in every sense of the word: the houses we're left, the wounds we're handed, and the rare, unhurried love that finally asks nothing of us except to be honestly seen.
Excerpts
"I had the distinct, unwelcome sensation of a story beginning whether I had agreed to be in it or not."
"You're standing in poison ivy," he said, without turning around. "How did you know that without looking?" "Because it's the only thing growing on that side of the wall, and you've been there long enough for me to wonder if you were going to say something or just observe me work."
"I want to believe you," I said. "I really want to. But I don't want to be the reason a child grows up without a father. I don't want to."
"I've spent two years restoring buildings other people had already decided were finished. You noticed there was something worth saving underneath all the work."