Introduction

“This multi-generational story is layered with juicy family secrets. The perfect summer read." —Jamie Brenner, bestselling author of A Novel Summer

Beloved bestselling author Karen White returns with a captivating new Southern drama about sisterhood, secrets and one woman’s reckoning with the past

As a child, Phoebe Manigault developed the gift of premonition after she was struck by lightning in the creek near her Charleston home. Plagued throughout her life by mysterious dreams, and always living in the shadow of her beautiful sister, Addie, Phoebe eventually moves to the West Coast, as far from her family as possible. Now, years later, she is summoned back to South Carolina, to help Addie care for their ailing mother.

As Phoebe’s return lures her back into deep-rooted tensions and conflicts, she is drawn to Celeste, whose granddaughter went missing years ago. Their connection brings comfort to Phoebe, while Celeste’s adult grandson Liam resurrects complicated emotions tied to Phoebe’s past.

But the longer Phoebe spends in her childhood home, the more her recurring nightmares intensify—bringing her closer to the shocking truth that will irrevocably change everything. Unfolding against the lush backdrop of the South Carolina Lowcountry, That Last Carolina Summer is an unforgettable story about the unbreakable bonds of family and the gift of second chances.

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Excerpt

Prologue

Phoebe

2001

Memory is a disloyal friend, an unreliable narrator whose motivations are not always benign. There are some things about that summer I remember with absolute clarity: the scalp-scorching heat; my dog, Bailey, getting hit by a car; getting my ears pierced. Yet other events are charred around the edges, obscuring my view when I peer through the lens of hindsight and with the longing for a life that was never meant to be mine.

That summer seemed to linger longer than most, with stories of cars overheating and people dropping from heatstroke the subject of front porch and grocery store conversations. Dogs didn’t venture past the shady boundaries made from giant magnolias and river birch trees, and the scalded leaves on our azaleas turned brown. Mother and Daddy stopped talking about how hot it was, as if naming it would summon the devil.

I spent most of August out on the water hoping for a reprieve in the form of a good breeze, wishing some temporary, but nonetheless debilitating, disease would befall me while I dreaded the waning days of freedom until the first day of school.

Which is how I found myself squatting at the end of our dock on that scorching hot August afternoon mentally f lipping through the list of possible afflictions I’d accumulated while reading the library’s collection of World Book Encyclopedia. My preoccupation with weird diseases would explain why I wasn’t paying as much attention to the weather that afternoon as I should have been. And why I ignored Mother’s often repeated warning to be careful what I wished for.

My bare feet on the dock were impervious to the uneven planks and loose splinters as I checked my crab pots and thought about lunch. I was always thinking about food. Mother had put me on another diet, something none of my nine-year-old peers knew anything about.

Mother was a former Miss South Carolina, with Standards and Rules that my older sister, Adeline, and I forgot to our peril. Not that Addie ever needed a reminder. But I found crabbing and fishing a better use of my time than practicing how to walk in high heels.

I’d been left to my own devices while they went for another fitting for Addie’s Peach Queen pageant dress, leaving me under the loose supervision of my aunt Sassy. As a single woman with no kids of her own, my aunt understood better than most the importance of letting children be children. She was also profoundly deaf, which made things easier for a growing girl who loved the wild freedom that existed outside her back door.

A blue heron perched on its long, skinny legs at the edge of the water, waiting for an unlucky snack to swim by, its cold yellow eyes pretending not to see me. I wasn’t offended, having grown used to being ignored, and had long since discovered that I thrived under the lack of attention. Otherwise, I’d be at Gwyn’s department store getting squeezed into a satin and tulle nightmare and being forced to suck in my tummy.

The wind blew the bird’s straggly white plume on top of its head, ruff ling the feathers on its S-shaped neck. The light blue painted bird feeder I’d made in Bible camp for Aunt Sassy swung in the strong breeze, thunking against the oak tree’s trunk. It was only one of about a dozen feeders filled daily by my bird-loving aunt but now unusually abandoned by the chatter of finches and other songbirds.

I dropped an empty pot back into the water and looked up at a quarreling flock of royal terns with their bright orange beaks and forked tails skimming low over the water instead of their usual hunting position high in the sky. I straightened, for the first time noticing the opaque wall-like cloud with the flat bottom hovering over us like a spaceship.

Birds were better forecasters than the weather people on television, and it was my own fault for not paying attention. According to Aunt Sassy, birds didn’t need mathematical calculations to predict the weather, and they were always right. Which is why I never took offense when Addie called me a birdbrain.

The first growl of thunder made me think of lunch again. I pulled up the second crab pot, frowning at the untouched raw chicken necks I’d used as bait, aware again of the statuesque bird. It twisted its long and slender neck to turn its head in the direction of the disappearing terns. With a great swoop of blue-tinged feathers, the heron lifted into the air and raced inland. I watched it disappear as I became aware of the peculiar hush around me. Behind the rustling grass and moving water the deafening absence of bird sounds roared in my ears.

I turned at the squeak of the back screen door’s hinges. Aunt Sassy stood in the doorway, her face scrunched in worry as she glanced up at the darkening sky. She signaled with urgent hand gestures that I needed to come inside quickly.

I signed to her to let her know I’d understood, realizing she must have felt the rumble of thunder. A jagged bolt of lightning pierced the marsh in the near distance. I began counting the seconds—one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi—just like Aunt Sassy had taught me, walking sideways to keep an eye on the sky and the wooden boards at the same time so I wouldn’t slip off.

My toes brushed the edge of the dock where it met the prickly Spartina grass of the yard as I struggled with recently learned third-grade math. Count the number of seconds between the lightning flash and the sound of the thunder and then divide by five to get the distance to the lightning.

“One Mississippi . . .”

The humid air crackled and snapped like thousands of ghost crabs, lifting my hair from root to end and shooting a tingling sensation tumbling up my bones. The sky burst open, and I started to run. A powerful punch struck me in the middle of my back, stealing my breath and knocking me onto my stomach.

Everything went dark, and I knew that meant I must be dead. Except I was aware of the spiky grass under my cheek, and the pelting of chilly rain on my bare arms and legs, and the briny smell of the marsh. But the familiar pulse of blood in my ears had disappeared. I was like a bug caught under a china cup. A vague sense of disappointment washed over me as I figured that this must be all there was to know about death, regardless of what Reverend Bostwick told us every Sunday.

A shout, a boy’s voice, came from somewhere. Far away at first and then up close. My elbows smacked the ground as hands flipped me over like a beached dolphin. I tried to open my eyes, but they only fluttered, revealing a rotating screen of solid gray and white.

Then the boy’s voice again, shouting for someone to call 9-1-1. Rain splattered my body but not my face, as if something was blocking me from the deluge. I heard a sound of rustling like fabric against wet wood next to my ear, and what felt like a rock began pounding rhythmically against my chest again and again, my body ignoring all my commands to get up and run.

Cold, wet fingers pinched my nose closed then tilted my head back, my hair tugging my scalp as my ponytail rubbed against the ground. I wanted the boy to stop, to go away, because a gray-and-white world was better than this unprovoked beating.

Then a warm breath was blown into my mouth once. Twice. My eyes flickered open, and a face appeared above me, the angry sky behind it forming an imperfect halo. My gray-and-white vision burst into full color. Startling green eyes the same shade as the marsh in August peered down at me, and I wondered if Reverend Bostwick had been right after all.

The boy sat back, and my eyes focused on the shark’s tooth he wore on a leather cord around his neck. My chest expanded with an involuntary intake of air then shrank again as a piercing pain cut through my consciousness. I gasped for breath, my skin and bones aching as the reassuring beat of my heart again rumbled within my head. An approaching siren melded into the noise of the rain and the wind and the sound of Sassy’s bird feeders crashing into each other as my eyes followed the boy.

“She’s going to be okay,” he said to someone I couldn’t see. His words cracked from exertion or because he was at that age when boys and their voices got stuck between childhood and manhood. I didn’t recognize him, most likely on account of me attending a private girls’ school in Charleston and not being around boys in general.

Soft hands cupped my face. I gazed up at Aunt Sassy, at her mute agony as she knelt beside me, stroking my face again and again like I was Lazarus raised from the dead. The boy stood as the sound of shouting men neared. He turned toward the house, his shirtless arms and torso bronzed by the sun, his wild bleached-blond hair longer than Mother or Daddy would approve of.

Aunt Sassy bowed her head over mine to kiss my forehead, and when she lifted it again, the boy was gone. I only learned his first name much later, but I remembered his eyes and the way the color matched the summer marsh. That day became the line of demarcation where the before of my life intersected with the after, and his appearance in it an unwelcome reminder of all I had lost.

They say that lightning never strikes twice. Which is understandable considering the odds are one in about fifteen thousand of being struck once in a lifetime. They also say that if you survive a lightning strike, you will have no memory of it.

But, as I’ve learned from experience, both are just the lies we tell ourselves. Like the platitudes a mother might use to soothe a scared child, we cling to myths and other assurances so we can sleep at night.

That doesn’t make them the truth.

1

“The homing instinct in birds and animals is one of their most remarkable traits: their strong local attachments and their skill in finding their way back when removed to a distance. It seems at times as if they possessed some extra sense—the home sense—which operates unerringly.”

—John Burroughs?From the blog The Thing with Feathers

Phoebe

2025

My phone rang at five fifteen in the morning. I’d fallen asleep on the couch, having convinced myself the night before that I would just close my eyes for a moment before getting up to get ready for bed.

I blinked, waiting for the phone to ring again so I could locate it in the cushions of the couch, gradually becoming aware of the soft voices on the television that I’d forgotten to turn off. Bette Davis’s black-and-white face was saying something to Henry Fonda in a passable Southern accent.

I recognized a scene from the movie Jezebel, a favorite classic I watched countless times with Aunt Sassy during my adolescence and her battle with pancreatic cancer. At the time, both afflictions had made everything seem untenable except for the Turner Classic Movies channel and benne wafers from Olde Colony Bakery. I had managed to outgrow my adolescence, but Sassy’s cancer remained intractable no matter what the doctors did or how many times I promised God I’d be the daughter my mother wanted me to be if He would only make my aunt better.

My phone rang again as I patted the cushions around me. The random thought struck me that Sassy and I had never watched Jezebel or any other movie with the captions turned on. Maybe Sassy’s lipreading abilities were better than she’d let on, or maybe she believed it wasn’t always necessary to hear what people were saying to understand everything you needed to know.

I stood, the movement revealing my phone’s hiding place by shifting it from my lap onto the floor. My sister’s name and number appeared on the screen, momentarily paralyzing me. Addie and I hadn’t had a real conversation since our father’s funeral nearly ten years before, and never on the phone. Even now we only interacted once a year during the awkward Christmases at the house in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, where we’d grown up.

It hadn’t always been that way between us. Despite having enough bedrooms in our family home, we’d insisted on sharing a room. She was my ally against our mother’s constant attempts to civilize me, and I was Addie’s alibi on the occasions when she escaped our parents’ supervision.

But like all things of childhood, we’d slipped off those skins like outgrown clothes. I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but by the time I reached high school, Addie had moved to her own room, and my sister became a stranger to me. I had lost my ally, but I remained loyal, hiding her increasingly wild escapades from our parents in the futile hope that she would remove her mask and become my sister again.

I continued to stare at the screen, waiting for it to go to voice mail. Instead, it rang again. I picked up the phone without answering and carried it to the kitchen, knowing that I would need coffee first before dealing with whatever Addie had to say.

The coffee canister sat in the middle of the counter, its lid hinged to the open position to remind me that I was out of coffee and that I needed to go to the grocery store. Damn. I took a deep breath. “Hello?”

My sister exhaled loudly, every ounce of her breath weighted with anger, annoyance, and the superiority only older siblings can manage. “It’s about time, Phoebe. Why can’t you just answer your phone like a normal person?”

I let the barb vibrate in its target before mentally dislodging it. “Wow. That was quick, even by your standards. I’m doing well. Thanks for asking. What about you?”

She didn’t bother responding, her usual form of dismissal. Instead, she said, “Have you spoken with Mother?”

A surprising and unwelcome scattershot of varying emotions peppered my insides. “No. Should I have?”

I heard our mother’s voice in the background, calling Adeline’s name with growing agitation. “I’ll be right there, Mother,” Addie called, her muff led voice followed by the sound of a door quietly clicking shut.

“Addie?” I asked.

“I’m here, I’m here. You need to come home, Phoebe. Right now.”

A heavy mixture of dread and worry congealed in my stomach. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“It’s Mother. She got lost driving to Home Depot for Christmas lights, and the police called me at work to come get her.” I thought for a moment, letting that sink in. “But it’s only May. Why was she buying Christmas lights?”

“That’s my point, Phoebe.” Her voice sounded even more agitated than before, and I wondered what I was missing.

“Okay,” I said slowly. My eyes drifted to the clock on the microwave. If I didn’t hurry, I’d be late for work, and I hated to be a bad example for the eighth-grade students I taught at the science academy. “Maybe there was a Christmas in July sale. Was it at night? You know how she’s never had a good sense of direction and can’t see at night. I’m guessing the police overreacted when one of them told her she shouldn’t be driving.” I walked toward the bathroom, shedding my clothes along the way.

“It’s more than that. Last week, she forgot to pick up my daughter after school.”

“Maybe she thought you were supposed to do it?”

“No, Phoebe. Mother always picks up Ophelia. Always. It’s her job.”

I felt the first stab of worry but pushed it aside. It seemed like the unfolding of one of Addie’s many minidramas she seemed to enjoy inflicting on the rest of us and nothing at all to do with our mother. I expected Mother to take the phone from Addie at any moment and tell her to act like a lady and stop being so dramatic.

“I’m sure she was out shopping and forgot the time. She was always late for school pickup, remember?”

“You need to come home. Now.” She screamed the last word, which solidified my opinion that she was being dramatic and that it was most likely all about an argument she’d had with our mother.

I turned on the shower, knowing she could hear the water hitting the tile. “Look, I’ve got to go or I’ll be late for work.” I wanted to tell her that today was the first day of the science fair and as the lead teacher I was in charge, but I didn’t bother.

“You have no idea what my life is like.” I heard the studied control in her voice, the steadied breathing. She was angry. I was an expert on reading people, but especially my only sibling. I’d grown used to living in her shadow, allowing me ample opportunity to study and observe, to learn where to find her vulnerable spots.

Maybe that was the thing between sisters: knowing exactly where to aim the arrow. We rarely missed. When I was seven and Addie nine, she’d convinced me that the reason I looked so different from the rest of the family was because I’d been found in an osprey’s nest as a baby and our parents adopted me out of pity.

I was a teenager when I realized that being adopted wouldn’t be so bad if it meant that maybe my real family was out there looking for me. That was the faint hope I’d carried with me through my twenties until in a stupid moment fueled by too much New Years’ Eve champagne, I’d confessed my dream to Addie. Her expression of ridicule had extinguished that small glimmer of possibility that maybe somewhere, I belonged to anyone else.

Addie inhaled sharply. “I took her to her doctor, and after, when she was putting her clothes back on, she put her dress on backward with the open zipper in front. Fortunately, she wore a slip, but still. She should have been mortified—I certainly was. Anyway, he wants her to see a neurologist.”

“A neurologist,” I repeated. I sat down on the edge of the tub, suddenly feeling ill. “Oh, no.” I kept the water running, billowing steam now filling the room and obscuring my ref lection in the cracked mirror over the sink.

I’d last seen my mother two Christmases ago. While selecting wineglasses to place on the dining table, I’d noticed my mother’s prized Waterford crystal barware covered in a heavy layer of dust. It was more than just a single week of the housekeeper’s forgetfulness. It looked like the shelves and glasses hadn’t been touched for months. In the past, Mother always gave a thorough inspection after our housekeeper, Patricia, had cleaned and would let her know if something wasn’t up to Mother’s standards.

Those dusty glasses were the equivalent of Mother leaving her slip exposed in a public place. I’d been eager to head back to the West Coast and didn’t want to find a reason to extend my visit and so had brushed my thoughts aside, thinking of dozens of reasons to explain the lapse.

“Yes,” Addie continued. “The neurologist will need to run some tests.”

“When is the appointment?” I asked, the feelings of animosity toward my sister subsiding.

“I didn’t make one,” she snapped. “You get the whole summer off, so it would make sense if you could spend it here.”

I thought of my summer plans of learning to cook. Of hiking in the Cascades with some of my fellow teachers. Of finally starting a blog containing all the bird wisdom I’d learned from Aunt Sassy. Returning to the place I’d worked so hard to get away from was not anywhere on the list. “Look,” I said. “Mother will be seventy this year. It seems to me that small memory lapses are a normal part of aging and—”

“Those aren’t small memory lapses, Phoebe. And seventy isn’t even considered old anymore. I need you to do this. I’m working a lot of night shifts now. Plus, I have Ophelia.” She added her daughter almost as an afterthought.

I stared in the mirror, my eyes round dark smudges staring back at me like some nameless monster. I pictured my beautiful mother, her hair and makeup always perfect, even first thing in the morning. Addie looked just like her. I was as different in coloring as I was in temperament from our mother. I’d been happy to relinquish all maternal affections to my older sister.

“It can’t be as bad as it seems.” I wasn’t certain if I was trying to reassure Addie or myself. “You know she’s always dieting—that can affect her cognitive abilities. After school ends, I can come home for a week or so to help out. But I already have plans for the summer. And I’ve been asked to cover one of the summer classes, which I agreed to because I could use the money. Someone has to pay my mortgage.”

The dig had been intentional. After a brief foray into broadcast journalism following college, Addie had returned to our parents’ house unemployed, pregnant, and single for what was supposed to be a temporary arrangement. Ten years later, she was still there. Addie had never remained employed for long, which meant I was pretty sure she didn’t pay for rent or food, and she definitely didn’t pay for Ophelia’s tuition.

Addie’s voice rose a notch. “She’s your mother, too.”

The words came out before I could hold them back. “But you’re her favorite.”

She sucked in her breath, meaning I had hit my mark. “Don’t be childish, Phoebe. I’m asking for your help with our mother. You’re acting like your stupid job is more important than she is. You’ve always been that way, acting like Mother is an afterthought. No wonder I’m her favorite. I at least give her love and attention, two things you don’t seem capable of.”

I felt chastised and angry. Everything she’d said had a grain of truth embedded inside vague inaccuracies that I didn’t have the time to unearth right then. “Look, Addie,” I said with a conciliatory tone. “School’s out in a couple of weeks—”

“Adeline!” Mother’s voice came through the phone, accompanied by pounding. “Open this door right this minute or I’m going to get your father.” She never raised her voice, even when Addie had failed so spectacularly or when my dog, Bailey, had eaten her prized heirloom roses. She didn’t need to. The threat of our father was enough to make us repent. Except he’d been dead for years.

I squeezed my phone, the edges digging into my palm, and listened to my sister’s tight, shallow breaths.

“I. Can’t. Handle. This.” Addie’s voice rose to a shrill scream.

I held the phone away from my ear and clenched my eyes shut, trying to block out the unwelcome reminder of my childhood, the feeling of helplessness and resentment knotted together and impossible to untangle. Ever since I could remember, checking out had been Adeline’s method of handling all negative emotions and events. It focused all the attention on her as people stumbled over themselves trying to figure out how to fix whatever might be bothering her.

I’d grown to believe that this was a flaw of beautiful people: they didn’t need to be clever or funny or emotionally grounded to survive. The rest of us had to forage for what genetic scraps had been left behind, and sometimes we found what we needed to survive and sometimes even to flourish.

The call ended. I waited for Addie to call back, to tell me she was sorry she’d overreacted, that of course she’d take care of things and we could discuss when I visited after school ended. And then I could feel that she had everything under control and didn’t need my help. My extraneous existence as the younger sister had been one of the reasons why I’d f led across the country to Oregon. Just not the biggest reason.

But she didn’t call back, and a growing unease about my mother and what might be going on with her took up residence in my head. I quickly showered and dressed before returning to the kitchen. Despite not being hungry, I grabbed a granola bar to sustain me through first period with a classroom full of students. I stood at the sink to eat, looking out the large picture window, the one selling point to the 1970s duplex. It framed a view of the distant

Cascade Mountains surrounding my adopted home of Bend, Oregon, where I’d escaped as soon as I had my masters. Teaching eighth-grade science had been my first job offer, and I took it for the main reason that it was far enough away from South Carolina. Away from where I was known as the girl who’d been struck by lightning and left with scars I couldn’t hide.

The Deschutes River that flowed through Bend bore no resemblance to the waterways of the Lowcountry, the sights and scents of the high desert as foreign to me as the moon. I’d hoped in time I’d forget the fragrant wax myrtles or the call of the night herons over the marsh and the smell of the pluff mud at low tide.

Nine years later, I was still pretending that I was better here, that the shapes of mountains nudging the gray skies were an adequate substitute for the flat horizon of watery savannas, that I didn’t miss the wraithlike arms of Spanish moss that was as cold-intolerant as I seemed to be. I’d hoped to grow to love the smell of snow before it fell. And I had. But all my new experiences were like a borrowed coat: offering warmth but with pockets empty of the small treasures from past seasons.

A goldfinch landed on the feeder hanging on the high branch of a western juniper. It was the same feeder I’d made for Aunt Sassy, the wooden sides and roof faded and warped from too many South Carolina summers. I’d replaced parts and repainted it over the years, and it had come with me to college and grad school, and then across the country. I always forgot to fill it, and then felt bad when a bird landed on it and regarded me with judgment like the goldfinch was doing now.

I squinted, recalling what Sassy had told me about goldfinches. They mated for life, shared nesting duties, and migrated together, side by side. They were happy, chatty birds and usually congregated in what was called a charm. But this bird was by itself, watching me through the window.

I pulled out the bag of seed from a cabinet and took it outside. The yellow bird flew to a higher branch but continued to keep a watchful eye while I poured out the remaining contents from the bag.

Wild birds always reminded me of the remarkable woman who loved nature even though she couldn’t hear the croaking frogs or singing birds or anything else the rest of us took for granted. I don’t know what it was Aunt Sassy heard when we stood in the backyard near sunset and watched the wrens and sparrows sweeping down from the dusky sky to feed, but from the rapt look on her face, I imagined it was a full symphony orchestra playing Mozart or Rachmaninoff or the soundtrack from some huge blockbuster film. She knew how to make the smallest things important and beautiful.

I still felt guilt at the memory of pretending to be bored listening to Sassy’s bird stories, careful not to be noticed showing an interest by my sister or her friends. It didn’t help that I’d been named after a bird. Unlike the name Adeline, Phoebe appears nowhere on our family tree. My father told me that an eastern phoebe had perched on a tree branch outside Mother’s hospital window after I was born, and she loved its bright, two-pitched song.

But Adeline said the name was given to me because of Mother’s disappointment at having another girl, so she had named me after the little bird of unremarkable coloring with its plump body and large head because it reminded her of me. I never asked my mother which was true, mostly because I was afraid of her answer. I crumpled up the empty seed bag and waited for the little yellow bird to return to the feeder, recalling something my aunt had told me about how the appearance of a goldfinch is meant as an encouragement to travel to new places, to let people see your beauty and the true you.

An unexpected wave of grief blew through me, and I found myself wishing, just for a moment, that I could believe it was my aunt’s soul sending me a message that my mother would be okay and that I would know what to do if she wasn’t. But the goldfinch remained on his perch out of my reach until he fluttered his wings and flew away.

Copyright © 2025 by Karen White view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the publisher:

1. How does the setting of the Lowcountry in South Carolina shape the atmosphere and tone of the story?

2. What role does the summer season play in the progression of events in the novel?

3. How does Karen White use the natural environment to reflect the emotions and struggles of the characters?

4. Discuss the theme of family secrets in the book. How do these secrets impact the relationships between characters?

5. How do the differing perspectives of the characters enhance or complicate the narrative?

6. What motivates the protagonist's choices throughout the novel? Were their decisions justified?

7. How is resilience portrayed in the story? Which character embodies this the most, and why?

8. Discuss the relationships between generations in the novel. How do past and present actions influence these dynamics?

9. How does the author explore grief and loss within the story? How have the characters coped with these emotions?

10. What role does forgiveness play in the resolution of the plot? Are all characters able to achieve it?

11.What are some key symbols in the book, and how do they contribute to its deeper meaning?

12.How does the use of flashbacks shape the narrative and your understanding of the characters' motivations?

13.Were there any moments in the book where you felt a character’s growth or transformation stood out?

14.How does the title, That Last Carolina Summer, reflect the themes and essence of the novel?

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