"Ginny Beale is eighteen, irreverent, funny, and brave, with a brother she adores and a circle of friends for whom she would do anything. Because of one terrible night, she loses them all—and her adventurous spirit—seemingly forever. While the town cheers on the high school football team, someone sets the school’s auditorium ablaze. Ginny’s best friend Gray Marsden’s father, a fire fighter, dies in the blaze.

While many in the town believe Daniel York, a notoriously troubled local teen, set the fire, Ginny makes a shattering discovery that casts blame on the person she trusts most in the world. Ginny tells no one, but the secret isolates her, looming between her and her friends and ruining their friendship.

Over the next two decades, Ginny puts aside her wanderlust and her dreams. Moving back to her hometown, she distances herself from the past and from nearly everyone in it. She marries a quiet man, raises their daughter, Avery, and cares for her tyrannical, ailing mother, Adela. But when Ginny’s husband, Harris, becomes embroiled in a scandal, Ginny’s carefully controlled life crumbles, and, just when she believes she is regaining her bearings, the secret she’s kept for twenty years emerges and threatens to destroy her hopes for the future.

With the help of fifteen-year-old Avery and of friends both old and new, Ginny must summon the courage to confront old lies and hard truths and to free herself and the people she loves from the mistakes and regrets that have burdened them for so long. "

Acquired via LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program.

Ginny is a senior in high school with a gift for writing and a positive outlook on life. She has a small group of close friends and she is ready to take on the world. But when a couple of events occur in succession, one of them tragic, her life changes and she essentially becomes a different person. Fast forward nearly 20 years. Ginny has mostly put her past behind her and is going through another unfortunate event, this time with her husband. While she comes to terms with that, the ghosts from her past re-emerge and she's forced to confront the dissolution of her previous friendships, while in the meantime she tries to protect her 15-year-old daughter from both the past and the present.

I remember really enjoying de los Santos' earlier books. I'd consider them higher quality beach reads/chick lit, though that's not a genre that I typically read a lot of. The last couple of her books were decent, though I didn't enjoy them quite as much. But I did like this one. It was a quick read, but she's a good writer and does a good job capturing the witty banter between characters. And I liked the story line in this one. Overall, I'd recommend it.

Dropped off in the Little Free Library.

You have found a BookCrossing book! Please take a brief moment to journal your thoughts upon reading this book. Then, if you'd like, re-release the book (to a friend, a stranger, or back out into the wild). That way you can track its travels & its readers throughout the world!