At first, Emmeline is apprehensive about the new world around her. The man, whose name is Henry, brings her to his cottage home in the nearby town of Secret Cove. With his wife Colette, he maintains an off-the-beaten-path summer resort. Despite Colette’s assurances to Emmeline that she is safe, the girl is overwhelmed by the new smells in the cottage and seldom leaves her room: “Scents will find their way around the darkness of closed eyes” (65). She clings to her father’s last sealed bottle, afraid to unstop it as this is the last memory she has of her father. Emmeline is still lacerated by guilt: “[The bottle] was the only proof of everything we had been—and of everything I had done to us. It was the best and worst of me” (67).

Over time, Emmeline emerges from the bedroom and tentatively explores the couple’s tiny home and the ramshackle cottages that make up the Secret Cove Resort. The resort is in perpetual need of work. The cottages are “silent, full of anticipation” (78). She asks Henry why her father came to the island in the first place, but Henry’s answer is mysterious: “Some people look for solitude” (70).

After a Canadian television series called Hidden Hideaways profiles the summer resort as a hidden gem, reservations begin to flood in.