DOWN BY THE WATER Hope Collins-Calder is beginning to lose her grip: she has a high-powered real estate job in the Hamptons that keeps her permanently stressed, an ex-husband she can't get out of her mind, a current husband she is beginning to regret, and three children who are running wild. When her latest child-care person leaves her in the lurch, she asks Eddie, her husband -- an Englishman hopelessly out of his depth working at an American publishing house -- if he will call his sister in London for the name of a good British nanny.Annabel Quick arrives on the scene, but Mary Poppins she is not. Annabel is fifteen years older than Hope, unmarried, brokenhearted, and until a recent mysterious fire, lived with her mother all her adult life, She has come to the United States, and to this job, in search of a brief escape. And since Hope can't afford to be picky, Annabel gets the job.Annabel sets about getting the Collins-Calder house in order, and finds to her surprise that as she does so, her own heart slowly begins to heal. When she meets Sheldon, a handsome local carpenter with penetrating blue eyes who has come to work on the house, she feels the stirring of emotions she thought she'd buried long ago. Sheldon's world offers Annabel a chance to move beyond the unhappiness that brought her to the United States in the first place. However, Annabel can't ignore the torch that Hope seems to carry for her ex, and as the summer unfolds, and marriages and old feelings are tested, Annabel becomes more a part of the family than she bargained for. And she and Hope each discover the surprises and promises of romance in this exceptionally entertaining, emotionally staggering, and positively original novel from a first-class writer.