Head to Wind - August Field

He came home for one summer. He didn’t plan on staying - and he didn’t tell anyone about the ticket out.

Seventeen years after Jesse Flaherty left Eider Bay - and the boy he loved - he’s back: broke, jobless, with one summer to earn his place at the family boatyard. Waiting in his inbox is a foreman’s job at a new Portland custom shop: better money, the career he spent seventeen years building toward, a deadline at the end of July - and money that comes straight from the developer who tried to turn his family’s boatyard into condos.

Joey Vane stayed. He built the town’s marine shop from nothing, and he built a life that doesn’t include getting left twice - not in front of the whole town. But the summer’s biggest restoration has a fixed sea-trial date, one engine, and two men on the same critical path - and some things still fit, seventeen years later.

A second-chance, hurt/comfort, small-town Maine romance about the difference between leaving and coming home.