Before Sera Lockwood learned what it meant to return, she had to learn what it meant to leave.
Years before What the Island Asks, Hatteras Island is the only home Sera Lockwood has ever known.
She is young, restless, and beginning to imagine a life beyond the familiar rhythms of her family's house, the changing water, and the people who have always seemed as permanent as the island itself. Beckett Crowe is already part of that world-steady, watchful, and building a life with his hands while Sera begins to wonder whether staying might cost her the future she wants.
At home, other changes are harder to name.
Her father remains rooted to the island and the life he understands. Her mother has begun carrying a distance Sera notices but cannot yet interpret. Small silences lengthen. Familiar routines shift. And what once seemed permanent begins, almost imperceptibly, to loosen.
As a late-summer storm approaches and Sera's own future draws closer, she must confront a question she is not yet prepared to answer:
Can you love a place completely and still need to leave it?
Before the Tide Turned returns to Hatteras Island before the events of What the Island Asks, revealing the choices, absences, and unfinished love that will echo across the years to come.
A quiet, atmospheric novel about first love, family, departure, and the moments we understand differently only after time has passed.
Book Four of The Hatteras Island Cycle-and the story of what came before.