At twenty-seven, pastry chef Tessa Marlowe has a starred kitchen, a career-defining job offer, and hands that no longer stop shaking. When burnout sends her home to Larkspur Bay, a sleepy seaside town in the Northeast, she intends to stay only long enough to sell her late grandmother's guesthouse and return to the city.

Nora Marlowe's will has other plans. To inherit the house, Tessa must run it through Labor Day and honor every booking her grandmother left behind, alongside co-manager Idris Calloway. He is her childhood best friend, the son of the local ferry family, and the boy she left without a proper goodbye after his father's death eight years ago.

Idris stayed. He kept the ferry running, kept the town's stories, and kept a jar of Nora's sourdough starter alive. Between an elderly couple celebrating fifty years of marriage, a family with noisy young children, a meddling teenage sister, and a dog with a mysterious habit of vanishing at four o'clock every afternoon, the two circle old wounds with sharp humor and quiet care. A forgotten summer list from their teenage years slowly draws them back together.

But the town's warmth comes with pressure. A buyer wants the house and the ferry mooring beside it, a job offer from Tessa's demanding head chef carries a deadline, and Idris harbors a wish he has never dared to say aloud. Both have built their lives around being useful, and neither believes they can be chosen for anything more.

As the summer festival nears, Tessa and Idris must decide what staying really means, and whether love can be a place they build together rather than one they leave or keep.