STILL ROOM AT THE LAKE HOUSE

Maggie Linden is forty-nine, widowed six years, and about to lose the heart pine floor of the Trade Street studio where she restores other people's paintings because she stopped making her own. Cole Colebrook is the carpenter who tells her it can be saved.

Then a lawyer's letter arrives from Mooresville: her aunt Ruth has died and left her the house on Long Point, four bedrooms of log and river stone standing over deep water. They spend a summer bringing it back — the screened porch, the boathouse, a 1961 Chris-Craft under a mildewed tarp. Maggie starts painting again. Cole builds a walnut table instead of buying a ring.

Then, on a Sunday in March, a squall line crosses the Catawba in twelve minutes and an old dog runs out onto the dock.