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THE OYSTERVILLE SEWING CIRCLE
Susan Wiggs
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
The News Building
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in the USA by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Susan Wiggs 2019
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover photograph © Laura Kate Bradley/Arcangel Images (front)
Shutterstock.com (back)
Susan Wiggs asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008151386
Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008151393
Version: 2019-07-12
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Three
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part Four
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part Five
Chapter 21
Part Six
Chapter 22
Part Seven
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Susan Wiggs
About the Publisher
In the darkest hour before the breaking dawn, Caroline Shelby rolled into Oysterville, a town perched at the farthest corner of Washington State. The tiny hamlet hung at the very tip of a narrow peninsula, crooked like a beckoning finger between the placid bay and the raging Pacific.
She was home.
Home to a place she’d left behind forever. To a place that held her heart and memories, but not her future—or so she’d thought, until this moment. The chaotic, unplanned journey that had brought her here had frayed her nerves and blurred her vision, and she nearly missed seeing a vague shadow stir at the side of the road, then dart in front of her.
She swerved just in time to miss the scuttling possum, hoping the lurching motion of the car wouldn’t wake the kids. A glance in the rearview mirror reassured her that they slept on. Keep dreaming, she silently told them. Just a little while longer.
Familiar sights sprang up along the watery-edged roadway as she passed through the peninsula’s largest town of Long Beach. Unlike its better-known namesake in California, Washington’s Long Beach had a boardwalk, carnival rides, a freak show museum, and a collection of oddities like the world’s largest frying pan and a carved razor clam the size of a surfboard.
Beyond the main drag lay a scattering of small settlements and church camps, leading toward Oysterville, a town forgotten by time. The settlement at the end of the earth.
She and her friends used to call it that, only half joking. This was the last place she thought she’d end up.
And the last person she expected to see was the first guy she’d ever loved.
Will Jensen. Willem Karl Jensen.
At first she thought he was an apparition, bathed in the misty glow of the sodium-vapor lights that illuminated the intersection of the coast road and the town center. No one was supposed to be out at this hour, were they? No one but sneaky otters slithering around the oystering fleet, or families of raccoons and possum feasting from upended trash cans.
Yet