The Bakery on Harbor Walk

Cora Pell has spent her whole adult life keeping a chair warm for everyone else. She has baked the wedding bread, the funeral bread, the welcome-home bread, and the early-morning bread of a small coastal town for forty years. She has been the steady, dignified, working-widow of Stillwater Cove since her late husband Frank died fifteen years ago. She has kept, in some private chamber behind her sternum, a small lit candle for a boy from her father's porch in 1979 that she never let herself name.Henry Sheehan is sixty-six years old. He was Margaret's husband for the long quiet middle of his life, and he was a good one. He has been a widower for four years. He has walked past Cora's bakery window twice a week for thirty-eight years. He has been carrying a small folded letter in the inside pocket of his coat that his late wife wrote him in her last week, telling him, gently, that when she was gone, he was to go to Cora. He has, finally, walked through the door.This is the story of a fifty-year deferred love. The slow patient way. The closed-door way. The small careful gestures of a small coastal town that has been keeping a chair warm for both of them, all along, without their knowing. A sweeping, later-in-life soulmate reunion about second chances at sixty, devoted widowers who fall first and harder, and the kind of love that does not, in fact, end, but finds a new pair of hands.