The Cottage Off the Books

About the book

Kate has always been her father’s daughter: an accountant in Charlotte who reads every page from the bottom up and has never once caught him in a lie. So when her mother walks out of a thirty-eight-year marriage asking for nothing but a leaky cottage on an island her daughters have never seen, and her father asks Kate to check the list of everything he owns before he swears to it, she says yes.

The cottage isn’t on it.

“Leave it off,” he tells her. “It’s worth nothing.” But the cottage belongs to a company Kate has never heard of, and the one name on its paperwork is a woman’s.

So Kate takes the ferry to Merrow Island to find out who her father has been keeping there. The island says she lived there twenty-three years and never paid a cent of rent. Kate can do that arithmetic.

Her mother, living over the bakery and feeding half the island, won’t explain a thing. Kate’s sisters have theories of their own: Molly is sure their mother has a man out there, and Tess thinks they’ve both lost their minds. The ferry captain, Sam, is the last man on the island Kate should be falling for. And up on the rise, a dying man keeps asking for the one person who has never come.

Kate came to the island to catch her father in a lie. She’s about to find out what he has really been keeping off the books.

The Cottage Off the Books is the first book in the Merrow Island series, a warm, clean family saga about three sisters, the parents they thought they knew, and a ferry-only island off the North Carolina coast. It finishes its own story, and the Calloway family’s secret runs through the whole series.