The Wish

In 1996, sixteen-year-old Maggie Dawes is sent to live with an aunt she barely knows in Ocracoke, a remote village on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. She misses her friends and family and wants to be anywhere else. Then she meets Bryce Trickett, one of the few teenagers on the island.

Bryce is handsome, honest and newly admitted to West Point. Through him Maggie starts to see what the windswept beach town has to offer, and he introduces her to photography, which becomes the work of her whole life.

The story moves between two periods. By 2019, Maggie is a celebrated travel photographer who divides her year between a gallery she runs in New York and assignments in far-off places. This Christmas she is stuck at home, absorbing a serious medical diagnosis. She leans more and more on her young assistant, and the two grow close.

As the holiday season runs down, Maggie tells him about an earlier Christmas, long ago, and the love that sent her life in a direction she never expected. It is a romance told in memory, set against a small coastal community and a winter shadowed by illness. Expect a reflective, emotional tone rather than a fast plot.