Darby Andrews is on the brink of marrying Jackson when something in her heart makes her write a letter to the one that got away. Resigning herself to her fate, she puts the letter aside, only for her sister Dahlia to send it—setting the stage for her long-lost love Leo Graham to reappear and help her escape the fate of a loveless marriage, which has been engineered by her domineering father. The narrative shifts to 10 years earlier, when 17-year-old Darby is sent to her grandmother’s home in Pacific Shores, California, for the summer while her parents deal with a situation involving her rebellious sister. Raised in a conservative and controlling household in Kansas, Darby doesn’t know what to do with her feelings for Leo, the handsome surfer boy who uses the trail through her grandma’s yard to get to the beach. Over one bewitching summer of freedom, Darby and Leo fall in love. The novel switches between timelines and the perspectives of Leo and Darby. Bailey does a great job of contrasting their teenage chemistry with their guarded present selves as they take a road trip in a cherry-red 1976 Mustang far from Darby’s wedding, trying to unravel what went wrong before and determine why Darby found herself about to walk down the aisle with somebody else. The dual timeline will have readers absorbed in the captivating love story—even if it isn’t initially clear that “now” and “then” are 10 years apart (the author uses only days and months to show the passage of time in her chapter titles). Bailey’s prose is so achingly romantic (“We are infinite. We are destined. Written in the stars”) that it quickly overrides the timeline confusion to detail a romance in which the fireworks are clear from the very beginning.