After returning to her grandmothers house for the night, she finds a bundle of letter addressed to her held together with a piece of old yarn. As she opens the first one she reads that the letters tell the real story of her grandma, Sam, and all her true feelings and secrets. Sam writes that she only wants Jennifer to read a couple of letters at a time. Jennifer was shocked, because she was always close with her Sam after spending the summers down there growing up.
After a couple of days of visiting Sam in the hospital with no changes in her recovery she comes home one afternoon to a man standing on the porch. After introducing themselves Jennifer finds out that he is a friend from her childhood, Brenden. Although at first Jennifer rejected the company of Brendan, the two of them started spending a lot of time together. Throughout Sam’s coma when Jennifer would visit the hospital she would tell her what she was thinking about Brendan or what she had recently read in the letters. She tried to keep up with the demanding work of the newspaper, but she had to reduce her role and just write one article a week, which was still challenging.
In the letters Jennifer learned about Sam’s true relationship with her husband, Charles. The two of them were never loyal to each other. Charles would always sneak off to the city and have an affair, while Sam had a mystery man by the fake name of “Doc”. Sam and Charles stayed together for the benefit of their children and grandchildren.
Over time Brendan and Jennifer open up to each other. Jennifer shares about the sensitive subject of her husbands death and the miscarriage of their baby. Brendan shares the fact that he has brain cancer and the only option would be experimental surgery that could possibly kill Brendan or leave him paralyzed. It was important to him to spend one last summer at his uncles beach house