Fourth in the USA-Today bestselling PACIFIC HORIZONS series! Is there ever a good enough reason to let your children think you're dead? Since leaving her home in Maine two years ago, geriatric nurse Mei Lin has done nothing but make mistakes. For penance, she took a private-duty nursing job no one else wanted - caring for a dying woman in a remote Alaskan town in the dead of winter. But affable optimist Mei Lin couldn't even get self-punishment right. She's been hopelessly happy in the welcoming little community of Gustavus, and now, as the summer sun lingers and the wildflowers bloom, she realizes that her real penance will be having to leave. Meeting British Columbian wildlife specialist Thane Buchanan seems like one more happy perk she doesn't deserve, but when she stumbles into a backcountry cabin and finds an elderly man unconscious on the floor, Mei Lin's streak of good fortune begins to turn. There is a link between the man she's falling in love with and the charismatic hermit who is determined to die on her - a link she can't ignore. The thought of deceiving the honest and straightforward Thane is unbearable. But what right does she have to untangle twenty years' worth of another family's lies? Plagued by unresolved demons of self-doubt, Mei Lin faces a critical, impossible decision... with potentially fatal consequences. In the USA-Today bestselling Pacific Horizons series of romantic women's fiction, characters facing tragedy, heartbreak, and painful family secrets are drawn to the wild beauty of the natural world. Breaching whales and howling wolves refresh their spirits, but only human love can heal their souls.