EssenceLee
Some summers change you. Some summers ruin you. And some follow you long after the tide goes out.
Seventeen-year-old Tegan Walsh has spent her whole life in Coral Cove watching wealthy families treat her coastal town like their private playground. While tourists fill the Shoreline Club every summer with yacht parties, bonfires, and perfect oceanfront lives, Tegan's family is barely staying afloat.
Getting a job at the Shoreline Club was supposed to help her escape.
Instead, it pulls her into a world of secrets she was never meant to touch.
Especially when she meets Luke Callahan, the quiet, magnetic son of the club's powerful owner. Luke is everything Tegan thought she hated: privileged, untouchable, born into a life she could never belong to. But beneath the polished image is someone just as trapped as she is.
What begins as stolen conversations and late-night swims slowly turns into something deeper, something dangerous.
Because Coral Cove has always protected its wealthy families.
And the closer Tegan gets to Luke, the more she begins uncovering the truth about:
old affairs,
buried scandals,
a fire the town never recovered from,
and the secret her own family has been carrying for years.
Now, with friendships breaking apart, corruption unraveling across the coast, and one devastating truth threatening to destroy everything she loves, Tegan must decide who she's willing to become when the summer finally ends.
In Coral Cove, everybody has something they're protecting.
And every family has one summer they don't talk about.