Apple Pie || JJ Maybank

"Apple pie baked just right
Home is wherever you are tonight"

Daphne Hayes has spent her entire life living next door to JJ Maybank.

They grew up on opposite sides of the same fence, with bedroom windows facing each other, sharing stolen snacks, bad ideas, scraped knees, and the kind of secrets you only tell someone who already knows.

They've always been each other's person.

The one who stays after.

The one who knows without being told.

The one who would jump off a boat without thinking if the other one went overboard.

For seventeen years, that's all they've ever been.

Best friends, Next-door neighbours, Partners in every bad decision the Cut has to offer.

But seventeen feels different.

Summer feels different.

And somewhere between late nights, boat rides, stolen beers, and the way JJ always seems to find her in a crowd, Daphne starts to wonder if there's something more to the way she feels about the boy next door.

Unfortunately, there isn't exactly time to figure it out.

Big John Routledge has been missing for nine months. The Pogues are broke, bored, and determined to spend another summer doing what they do best: getting into trouble.

Then a sunken boat, a motel key, and a decades-old mystery put them on the trail of something that could change everything.

As the Pogues chase a treasure buried somewhere beneath the Outer Banks, Daphne finds herself facing secrets of her own, including the ones waiting behind the front door of her house.

Because growing up taught Daphne and JJ how to survive.

But this summer might teach them something neither of them is quite ready for:

What happens when the person who has always been your best friend becomes the person you can't imagine your life without.

Five Pogues.
One treasure.
A lifetime of secrets.
And a love story that started next door.

Because somewhere between the Cut and the ocean, somewhere between childhood and seventeen, Daphne Hayes became JJ Maybank's home.

And maybe she always had been.