Summer's end

Deanna was eighteen when she married the handsome French attorney Marc-Edouard Duras. At thirty-seven she should be content with her elegant San Francisco home and her teenage daughter Pilar, but she is an artist whose work her husband demeans, and he spends longer and longer stretches abroad on business.

One summer she meets Ben Thompson, a respected art dealer, walking the beach. Art becomes the bond between them, and Deanna decides — pragmatically, she tells herself — that she will be his for the summer. Ben offers her a one-woman show, and a career she never dared expect begins to open in front of her.

Then tragedy strikes her other world, and Deanna is left facing an impossible reckoning. By summer's end she must decide whether to return to the life she built at eighteen or follow her heart.