Ten-year-old-"going on eleven"-Rosie Brown is a force of nature in the coastal village of Hawkins Cove, Maine. Small for her age but impossible to slow down, Rosie works-unofficially, as she likes to say-in her mother Lily's waterfront caf . She can carry three plates at once, refill coffee without spilling a drop, and has discovered that calling fishermen "hon" increases tips to at least twenty percent.
The townspeople call Rosie "a handful." Rosie thinks of herself as resourceful.
But Rosie has a problem she intends to solve: she doesn't have a dad. Raised by her mother alone, she has quietly begun evaluating candidates for the job.
A hundred miles away in Boston Harbor, Arthur Brock is running out of time. A 41-year-old Vietnam veteran living alone aboard his sailboat, Arthur carries the weight of a promise he never kept. When doctors tell him that surgery is his only chance to survive a congenital heart defect, Arthur makes a different choice. Instead of the operating room, he travels Downeast to find the young widow of a man who died beside him on a muddy river half a world away-and finally tell her the truth.
Arthur expects seething anger. Hopes for forgiveness. He does not expect what he finds in Hawkins Cove-including a sharp-eyed girl named Rosie.
As an unlikely friendship forms between a determined girl searching for the father she never had and a man burdened by a past he cannot escape, both are forced to confront the fragile ways that love, guilt, courage, and redemption shape the lives we build.