For twelve years, he has been grieving her.
For twelve years, she has been wondering why he never came looking.
Days after he finally proposed to someone else, she is about to walk back into his life.
Every Sunday for twelve years, Dr. Jackson Waller has walked to a quiet corner of the Cliffside Bay cemetery, set pink ranunculus at the foot of a weathered granite headstone, and told the only girl he has ever loved what she missed that week.
He has kept his life small. Practiced medicine next to his father at the town clinic. Bought the dilapidated French chateau on the hill she had always dreamed of owning, for reasons he does not say out loud. Tried, in every reasonable way, to stop looking for her face in every crowd.
And when none of that worked, he finally proposed to someone else.
That was yesterday.
Maggie Keene left Cliffside Bay at eighteen with grief in one hand and a torn-up Broadway audition ticket in the other — pushed out, in the end, by the boy she loved and the ultimatum he should never have given her. She got on a bus to Brooklyn. She poured twelve years of heartbreak and brilliance into a dance career she built from the callouses up — and a songbook she has never shown anyone.
And for twelve years, she wrote letters home that, as far as she could tell, nobody opened.
Her mother was dead. Her baby sister was dead. Her father — drunk, cruel, never forgiven — had told her to stop making up stories about the night any of it happened. And the boy who swore he would love her forever had, apparently, stopped answering his mail.
She gave up. She built a life. She did not look back.
Until a phone call at four in the morning on her thirtieth birthday.
Her father is dying. Her father wants to make amends. Her father — so says the woman who married him — has something he needs to tell her before he goes.
Maggie Keene does not come home for forgiveness.
She comes home to ask one question.
Where did you hide my sister's body?
What she finds, instead, is her own name on a tombstone.
A whole town that has spent twelve years mourning her. A doctor who has just slipped a diamond onto the finger of another woman — twelve years too late. A postmistress who has been quietly returning her letters for a decade. A father who has no intention of telling her the truth. And a secret buried twenty years ago that is, as it turns out, not buried at all.
Jackson Waller is twelve years late.
He is about to find out that every day of those twelve years, Maggie Keene has been alive, and writing, and loving him — and there is still a grave in Cliffside Bay that does not have the right name on it.
Deleted is the second book in the Cliffside Bay series — an emotionally charged second-chance romance featuring high-school sweethearts torn apart by a father's betrayal, a small-town doctor hero about to marry the wrong woman, a dancer-turned-songwriter heroine returning home to a grave with her own name on it, a staged-death secret twelve years in the making, a baby sister whose story is not over yet, the dilapidated French chateau they always dreamed of, and a love story that refuses to stay in the ground.
Because in Cliffside Bay, some love stories don't end when someone says goodbye.
Sometimes they are waiting, patiently, for the truth to come home.
