Stories to get lost in

Bee Vaughn is about to turn forty when the phone rings and her sister Meg tells her their mother has died. There is a funeral to attend, a birthday that no one will celebrate, and a long-buried family story that Bee has spent most of her adult life carefully not thinking about.

So she returns to St. Thomas, the island where she spent three years as a teenager and the place she left at sixteen. The hurricanes have reshaped the coastline, but the island still holds the people who remember her, including Hendrix, the bartender who once helped a lonely teenager with her homework and still has a way of making her feel seen.

As Bee adjusts to island life, she finds herself sifting through the past too, and facing what it means to forgive a mother she never got to confront, and a sister she may have failed. Slowly, she begins to build something new on the foundation of what was broken.

Tender, funny, and quietly powerful, Stepping on Sea Urchins is a story about the secrets that outlive the people who kept them, and the courage it takes to go back.