In 2007, when Alex Matthews was 19, her mother committed suicide. Adrift in her grief, Alex pulled away from her brothers' attempts to keep the family together. Lost to the dark waters of her own self-destruction, she found solace not in her boyfriend Marc, but in her professor, Jonathan, who she followed to Austin without telling anyone. It was only after five years of self-imposed exile that she returned to Port Aransas no longer with Jonathan, but with a four year old daughter. In 2018, now married to Marc, Alex writes a letter pouring out the guilt and regret she's been holding onto for nearly two decades. In it, she explains why she left, where she was through those five years, and, most importantly, why she kept their daughter from him. It will be her final penance for disappearing while she fought through the raging sea of her grief to break a cycle set in motion generations before her. A love letter to Janet Fitch's and Joan Didion's , is written with a lyrical voice that sways between prose and poetry while never flinching from the difficult emotions that come from grief and the weighty bond between a mother and a daughter.