After the Wave: A small-town Irish romance about grief, saltwater, and second chances

When the wave took everything, she swore she would never come back.
Years after the accident that shattered her coastal Irish town, Orla Quinn has built a careful, landlocked life in Dublin—no sea, no storms, no reminders of the night the ocean decided who it would keep. But when a family emergency drags her home to the windswept village she once loved, Orla finds the shoreline waiting for her like an old ache.
The town has changed. Some people have forgiven. Some never will. And standing in the middle of all that history is Finn Kavanagh—childhood friend, once-almost-everything, the man who pulled survivors from the water and has been drowning in guilt ever since.
Finn has learned to live with the tide: rescue, repair, repeat. He knows every rock and current along the coast, but he never learned how to live with the girl who left and the silence she took with her. Having Orla back means facing the old questions—about that night, about what they were to each other, and about the future neither of them dared to imagine.
As Orla is pulled into the rhythms of the town again—school runs, pier-side coffees, the sharp humour and blunt kindness of people who knew her “before”—she’s forced to decide whether her life will always be split in two: before the wave and after.
With a vulnerable child who trusts her, a town that needs her voice, and a man who has always been the safe harbour she was too broken to reach for, Orla has to choose whether she will keep living half a life inland… or risk everything on the shore that almost took her.
After the Wave is a deeply emotional, small-town Irish romance about grief that lingers, love that refuses to drown, and the quiet, everyday courage it takes to come home to yourself.