Brighttide

By Laura Carpenter

Niamh Hanratty is very good at keeping other people afloat.
By day she's the calm centre of a Galway classroom, building "Bright Tide" - a project that teaches kids how to name their needs, ask for colour instead of volume, and know they're allowed to leave and come back. By night she's juggling guardianship paperwork, tide tables, and one small boy who trusts labels more than promises. Toast instead of cake, lists instead of drama. It's enough. Mostly.
Cormac Donnelly keeps old ferry engines honest.
He's an engineer on the Holyhead run who would rather coax a reluctant bolt than take a microphone, a man with tinnitus, storm memories, and a strict personal policy about not becoming anybody's story. When his company partners with Niamh's school, he's meant to stand at the back, fix the sound desk, and go home.
Then a child in the front row flinches at the feedback squeal, and Niamh steps in with colour cards, consent questions, and a teacher voice that feels like a good library.
Cormac watches the whole room settle - and realises he's not the only one who's been living at amber.
As the Bright Tide wall fills with Polaroids and small victories, Niamh and Cormac build a quiet alliance: ferry safety briefings rewritten in human language, storm plans that don't perform for capes, a kitchen "command centre" where guardianship forms are tackled with rope, tea, and a bee pen that only stamps COURAGE when earned. The more they make weather bearable for the kids around them, the harder it is to pretend they're not slowly choosing each other too.
But paperwork glitches, old grief, and the loud edges of the world don't vanish just because you've drawn a safe square on the floor. When a real storm hits - outside and inside - Niamh and Cormac have to decide whether Bright Tide is just a project... or the blueprint for a life where home is logistics, gentleness, and the kind of love that shows up on time.
Brighttide is a tender, Irish coastal romance about found family, guardianship, and the quiet revolution of asking, "What colour are you?" and staying for the answer.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN13: 9798243077125
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 314 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"