On Mystic Lake (Paperback)

For twenty years, Annie Colwater has lived the safe, affluent Malibu life with her lawyer husband and talented daughter. But on the morning her daughter goes away to college, husband Blake announces he's in love with another woman and wants a divorce. Devastated, Annie returns to her childhood home, a logging village on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, and soon volunteers to take care of young Izzie Delacroix, daughter of Nick, a girlhood flame of Annie's. His wife, Annie's childhood friend, committed suicide, leaving Nick with a drinking problem and Izzie mute, believing she's disappearing piece by piece. Annie's dad Hank can't believe Annie would so quickly enmesh herself with such a dysfunctional family, and Annie can hardly believe it either, but she's doing the only thing she knows how to do: love and take care of others. In Izzie, she sees herself: she too lost her mother at a young age; she too learned to silence her inner voice. In knowing and healing Izzie, Annie comes to know and heal herself and to demand from Nick the responsibility she never asked of her own husband. Unlike Blake, Nick rises to the occasion, and as Nick and Annie and Izzie stitch an odd patchwork family out of their separate lives, Nick and Annie fall passionately in love. Then a bolt out of the blue strikes, and Annie must make an agonizing choice that will test her new found courage and show her the high cost of playing it safe.