All Accounted For

About the book

Tess is the youngest Calloway: a teacher just back from a girls’ school in the mountains of Guatemala, with $212 in the bank, a job offer in Peru and one wish for Christmas. All of them in one room, for once in their lives. Her mother is living on Merrow Island now, her father is alone in Charlotte with his soup and his receipts, and her sisters are busy being right. So Tess takes the ferry over, joins the crew finishing her mother’s attic at fifteen dollars an hour, and starts planning Christmas.

The crew’s boss is Jesse Carver. He rebuilt half the island after the hurricane, measures everything three times, and has been paid by a lawyer in the city, on time, every time. Jesse never once asked whose money it was. He’d like Tess to stay. Tess has a flight to Lima on the third of January.

Then, behind the old boards under the eaves, they find a box marked with a name from her father’s past. On the stairs the bottom gives way, and the papers go everywhere: a bill of sale from 1990, at a price that makes no sense for a man worth forty million dollars.

Molly is sure it proves everything she has ever thought about their father. Kate says nobody calls him. And the woman the box belongs to asks for one promise: not a word to her son, not before Christmas.

Tess came to the island to bring her family together. Now she’s holding the one thing that could break it apart for good.

All Accounted For is Book 3 of the Merrow Island series, a warm, clean family saga: Christmas on a ferry-only island off the North Carolina coast. It finishes its own story, so you can start here; the Calloway family’s secret runs through the whole series.