When Cara Rutledge rents out her quaint beach house on
Isle of Palms to Heather Wyatt for the entire summer, it’s
a win-win by any standard: Cara’s generating income
necessary to keep husband Brett’s ecotourism boat business
afloat, and anxiety-prone Heather, an young artist who’s
been given a commission to paint birds on postage stamps,
has a quiet space in which to work and tend to her pet
canaries uninterrupted.
It isn’t long, however, before both women’s idyllic
summers are altered irrevocably: the alluring shorebirds—
and the man who rescues them—begin to draw Heather out of
the shell she’s cultivated toward a world of adventure,
and maybe even love; at the same time, Cara’s life reels
with sudden tragedy, and she wishes only to return to the
beach house that had once been her port amidst life’s
storms. When Heather refuses to budge from her newfound
sanctuary, so begins the unlikeliest of rooming
situations. While they start out as strangers, as
everything around the women falls apart they learn that
the only thing they can really rely on is each other.
And, like the migrating shorebirds that come to the island
for the summer, these two women of different generations
must rediscover their unique strengths so by summer’s end
they, too, can take flight in ways they never imagined
possible.