Meet Me at the Lake

Carley Fortune writes the summer-shaped wound better than anyone currently working, and Meet Me at the Lake is the desk's pick for her best machine: one perfect day, one broken promise, and a nine-year gap with a resort attached, assembled cleanly from the first page. At twenty-two, Fern Brookbanks spent a single day in Toronto with a stranger named Will Baxter, twenty-four hours of the kind the genre calls a whole relationship in miniature, and it ended with a pact for the same place, one year later. She went. He never came. Nine years on, Fern has inherited her mother's lakeside resort along with its debts and its ghosts, and the man who walks up the dock offering to help save the business is, of course, Will, older, careful, and carrying the reason he broke the promise like luggage he has not unpacked for anyone.

The desk admires the two clocks Fortune runs. The past timeline replays the one day in full (the walk, the confessions, the sketchbook, the almost), and it earns its mythology honestly; the desk understands precisely why a person would build nine years of what-if on those hours. The present timeline is where the book does its adult work: Fern grieving the complicated mother the resort keeps handing her in objects, the business itself as an inheritance that is also a question, and Will's reason, which the desk will keep folded to the last, landing, when it comes, not as a twist but as a re-pricing of everything the missed year cost both of them. Fortune is particularly good on the anger phase of reunion, the part most second-chance books skip. Fern does not melt, and Will does not expect her to, and the rebuilding is conducted at the speed of actual trust.

What we admire most is the setting as argument. The lake is the book's third clock, all mornings, docks, and the hospitality rhythm of other people's holidays, and the novel's quiet thesis is that some inheritances get chosen twice — once by staying, once by letting someone stay with you.

Honest notices: content guidance for parental loss and grief, present-tense and central; an anxiety thread is handled with care. Heat is warm and well timed.

Who is this for? Keepers of one perfect day, anyone who inherited a place with a person still in it, and readers who want their reunion earned in instalments. Take the dock at morning. The desk will be at the end of it, reading, and notes for planners that Fortune's summers form a loose shelf of their own — different lakes, same honest ache — for readers who finish this one and want the season extended. We always do. The season obliges.