Nothing to Spare

About the book

Molly is the loud one: the middle Calloway daughter, with two kids, a minivan and a husband who has started saying “please” a little too carefully. So when her mother walks out of a thirty-eight-year marriage for a room over a bakery on Merrow Island, Molly is sure she knows why. His name is Walt. He runs the boatyard, he keeps her mother’s old thermos on his shelf, and he says “Diane” as if he’s been saving it.

But the island isn’t about to give Diane back. She does the four o’clock bake, puts in old Mr. Pell’s eye drops and knows every dog at the fish fry by name. She belongs to everybody on Merrow Island. And she has never once asked her own daughter for anything.

Up on the rise, her father’s old business partner is dying, and he keeps asking for “Richard’s other girls.” Molly has no intention of going up there.

Then a hurricane turns toward the coast. The visitors are ordered off, her mother won’t leave, and Molly won’t leave without her. Her husband drives all night to make the last boat. And as the storm closes in, Diane asks her daughter for something for the first time in her life: to climb the rise and sit with the man Molly swore she’d never see, with the power out and the oxygen running low.

Molly came to the island with a question for everyone. The storm is about to bring her answers she never asked for: from her mother, from a dying man, and from her own husband.

Nothing to Spare is Book 2 of the Merrow Island series, a warm, clean family saga set 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.