North Carolina, 1965
James Calloway is a quiet farm boy with river mud on his boots, grief in his house, and no plan beyond another summer in Beaufort. Then he sees Eleanor Sawyer in a yellow dress on the Fourth of July, and everything in him goes still.
Eleanor is bookish, bright, and one year from leaving for a life bigger than the town that raised her. James was never part of that plan. But he is steady hands and long silences and a love that feels like home before either of them knows what to call it - and by the end of that summer, Eleanor isn't sure she wants the bigger life anymore.
Then the war takes him.
James comes home from Vietnam with a medal, a limp he'll carry the rest of his life, and something he buried in the river the day he returned. He marries Eleanor. He gives her the family, the years, the quiet good life they both wanted.
He never tells her what it cost.
For forty-nine years, the water holds what he couldn't - until the morning it gives it back.
First Love - War Romance - Small Town Southern Romance - Farm Boy Hero - Bookish Heroine - Marriage Through the Years - Wounded Veteran - Family Secrets - Emotional Slow Burn - Love That Lasts a Lifetime
