Harbor House by Katie Winters

When Stella Vanberg dies, she leaves her children one final gift: a mystery that will change everything they thought they knew about their family.

The night Candice Vanberg discovers her celebrated novelist husband has been having an affair with one of his graduate students, her world shatters.
Then the phone rings.
Her mother—elegant philanthropist Stella Vanberg, the woman who seemed larger than life—is dead.

Unable to face the wreckage of her marriage, Candice escapes to her family’s beloved Harbor House on Nantucket with her siblings, Lindsey and Henry. As they gather to mourn the woman they thought they knew, Candice finds herself standing at a crossroads. Her children are nearly grown, her writing career has been dormant for years, and for the first time in decades, she has no idea what comes next.

But Stella has one final surprise waiting for them.
In her will, she leaves instructions for Harbor House to be transformed into a refuge for women facing hardship and crisis, effectively giving away the cherished family home. Shocked, Candice and her siblings struggle to understand why their mother would choose strangers over her own children.

The answer lies in a past Stella never shared.
When a chance conversation with an old high school love uncovers whispers of Stella’s forgotten songwriting career, Candice begins digging through her mother’s records, journals, and guarded memories. What she discovers raises an impossible question:

Who was Stella Vanberg before Nantucket?

As Candice follows the trail of clues, a remarkable story emerges, one of a young woman who lost everything, fled her old life, and found refuge in a seaside sanctuary. The deeper Candice ventures into her mother’s hidden history, the more she realizes that Stella’s greatest secrets weren’t acts of deception, but acts of survival.

Rich with heart, hope, and the healing power of family, this unforgettable women’s fiction novel explores the bonds between mothers and daughters, the courage it takes to reinvent yourself, and the legacy we leave behind. Set against the windswept beauty of Nantucket, it’s a moving story of love, loss, redemption, and the extraordinary truth that sometimes the people we think we know best still have stories left to tell.