Abby Rhodes is just starting to get her life on track. After her fiance´'s unexpected death, she returned with her young son to the small village where she grew up and threw herself into helping her ailing grandmother run the town's beach cafe´. Then one evening, her mother, Laura, shows up in Hartley-by-the-Sea and announces her plan to stay. After twenty years away, she now wants to focus on the future, and has no intention, it seems, of revisiting the painful past.