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GRACIE PAGE

First published in the United Kingdom by Harper Fire, an imprint of HarperCollins Children’s Books, in 2026

HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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HarperCollinsPublishers

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Special thanks to Genevieve Herr

isbn 978-0-00-881620-9

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Chapter One

Mia Hart practically floated down Fox Bay’s high street, rucksack slung over one shoulder, a light breeze ruffling her blonde curls. What a beautiful day, she thought dreamily. The last day of her exams. The sort of day where only good things were likely to happen. The bright June sunshine glinted off the sea beyond the harbour. Kids ran past her down to the sea front and the promise of ice cream. The air smelled like salt and sunscreen and possibility.

Mia was often accused of having her head in the clouds. And it was true, she was a hopeless romantic. But sometimes, she thought, real life could be pretty wonderful too. And today was about as good as it got. She was pretty sure she had nailed every question on that English exam. And now exams – and school – were finally over. Her summer, and the rest of her life, stretched ahead of her. A prestigious film course in London that autumn was the first of the exciting adventures in store. Mia grinned. Things were only going to get better and better. She fished out her phone to text her best friend Callie, dodging clusters of students already heading to the Driftwood

Café for celebratory iced coffees and cake, waving at people she knew as she passed. Callie had been collected from the exam hall promptly to make a train to London, where she had an internship – two months working with the medieval history team at the British Museum. Not every eighteen-year-old’s idea of the perfect summer, Mia thought with a grin, but then Callie wasn’t every eighteen-year-old.

Callie and Mia had bonded at nursery and stayed friends due to their love of all things romance – but while Mia preferred her romance firmly on the page or in the cinema, Callie had gone down a seriously medieval route. She adored all things chivalry and dragon lore. Instead of swooning over Taylor Swift, she pored over tragic ballads sung in draughty castle halls. Even her outfits were heavily accessorised – as much velvet as she could manage, elaborate hairstyles and lockets – and she had a penchant for quoting poetry. She was also warm, loyal and endlessly imaginative, and Mia was going to miss her horribly. Callie being in London was the only fly in the ointment this summer. She typed fast.

How did it go? All the questions we revised came up, just like we wanted! Text me when you get to London.

Mia shoved her phone back in her pocket. She picked up her pace, excitement bubbling again. Something beyond endof-exam-freedom excitement. A whole different excitement. A sense that her life was about to tip into something big.

A wave of anticipation swept over her as she walked down the high street. The atmosphere in the quaint little Cornish seaside town of Fox Bay was buzzing, matching her mood –and not just because it was the end of exams. Everyone, from the couples holding hands at the tables outside the Driftwood Café, to parents chatting in the school playground, to the fishermen on the pier, seemed to be talking about one thing: the film. The real Hollywood movie that was about to start shooting right here in Fox Bay, based on the bestselling romance novel Ocean Deep.

Mia still couldn’t quite believe that this film was happening at all, let alone that it was being filmed in her own home town. It was the stuff of dreams for her. Ocean Deep was her favourite romance book in the world – and Mia had read a lot of romance books. She had been obsessed ever since Josie – her godmother and unofficial life coach – had decided that Mia was altogether too serious and had introduced her to the genre at a definitely inappropriate age. Mia tore through the novels voraciously and wanted more. From that moment on, Mia was in love with love.

‘You’re just like me, darling,’ Josie would tell her. ‘A true romantic, in an ordinary world. But there’s always romance to be found, you know, even in everyday things. You just have to look for it.’

Josie, her mother’s best friend, was a tall, glamorous hippie with greying curls and a penchant for flowing scarves. She adored tragic Russian poetry, long walks in the moonlight

and felt strongly that life was meant to be lived passionately. She ran the local bookshop, Wildest Dreams, and seeing a kindred spirit in Mia, took her education in the romance genre seriously. In Wildest Dreams, among the shelves of dog-eared paperbacks and glittering dreamcatchers, Josie had turned Mia into a hopeless romantic before she’d even learned how to spell infatuation.

As the years passed, Mia devoured every Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, Jenny Han and Kathleen Lee romance on the shelves, swooning over men in frock coats while her classmates obsessed over vampires and dystopian heroes. She lived and breathed romance. In spite of the fact that her parents had broken up after her brothers were born, Mia believed implicitly in true love. As Josie had warned her, her romance books made the rest of the world, even somewhere as quirky as Fox Bay, seem ordinary in comparison. Whenever times got tough – a falling-out with friends, a rough day at school – Mia would turn to romance. She found it comforting. Sure, there was the occasional unfortunate tragedy on the moors, but most of the time things worked out. There was usually hope to be had in those last pages.

She loved romance films, too. The warmth, the quirk, the heart. Say Anything, Anastasia, While You Were Sleeping, The Wedding Banquet, Pride and Prejudice. She loved the declarations in the rain. She loved the squabbling background characters. She loved the misunderstandings. She loved the endings, where the couple confessed their love in a swooning close-up, the

elderly aunt uttering one last waspish put-down, the screen fading to black with all the loose ends tied up.

The best thing, Mia would think as the credits rolled, was that you never have to worry about what happened next. Harry and Sally would always be each other’s best friend, Lizzie and Darcy would always smoulder at each other across a ballroom, and Blue and Simon would always be as happy as they were on that Ferris wheel. Whenever life got tough, Mia would put on a romance film or open up a book. She began to obsess over what made these movies so compelling – the love to hate structure, the swelling music over a declaration of love, the subtle development of expressions and body language and costume as the central couple began to spark off each other. Using the battered family iPad, Mia began drafting in her friends to make her own high school romance movies. For the most part, her friends were amenable and let her direct them in whatever ambitious project she had in mind – a retelling of Wuthering Heights filmed on the pier in Year 5 or a one-woman condensed short based on Persuasion two Christmases ago, with Callie playing all the parts. Mia’s family sat through them all and applauded after each one. One day she dreamed of making real movies, for a proper audience – films to warm even the saddest or loneliest of hearts. Nothing could beat being in a cinema, with a whole crowd of people all hanging on the lovelorn heroine’s every word and cheering when the happy ending finally arrived. Mia hadn’t had any great romances of her own yet, but she

was sure it would happen one day for her – and it would be just like the movies.

As Mia turned past Wildest Dreams now, she saw Josie stacking shelves and gave her a cheery wave. She noticed her godmother putting a poster in the window – Calling all Fox Bay Readers for the Annual Wildest Dreams Readathon! Mia sighed. Her memories of the Fox Bay Readathon were not good.

The summer she turned eleven, Mia had made it her mission to read all the romances in the shop. That was the summer she should have won the Wildest Dreams Junior Readathon, she thought, with a flicker of irritation. She still remembered the sting of coming second to that tourist boy with the dark hair and a smug smile – just because his fantasy books had more pages (a lot more pages), a whole other language and a glossary. Unjust, completely. Why should navel-gazing dragons win out over friends to lovers?

As she got older, Mia frequently brought up that Readathon to anyone who would listen as an example of literary snobbery that, unfortunately, seemed to extend to all things romance. It felt like if a book had a pastel cover and seemed like it might be fun, people would dismiss it as fluffy and silly. They were missing out, Mia thought.

Still, if Mia still bore a grudge for losing out on the Readathon cup all those years ago, she had no worries about this summer. Because she was going to see movie magic happening right here, in Fox Bay.

A couple of years ago, Kathleen Lee’s newest romance novel, Ocean Deep, had been unexpectedly launched at Wildest Dreams. In true Fox Bay fashion, the launch hadn’t exactly gone to plan – but it had sparked huge excitement in the town, not to mention that it had put Josie’s shop on the tourist map, with BookTokkers and Kathleen Lee fans making their pilgrimage to Fox Bay. Kathleen Lee had declared the sleepy little town to be exactly how she had imagined the one in her book.

And the excitement had only continued. All last year, there had been speculation in the Kathleen Lee reddit boards about a movie in the works. And then, last winter, Brooke Wakefield had appeared in Fox Bay, renting a room above Wildest Dreams. It turned out she was a famous Hollywood producer and she had come to Fox Bay specifically to scout for locations for the filming of Ocean Deep. The rumours were swiftly confirmed by the industry press – Ocean Deep would be filming in Fox Bay that summer.

A famous romance film director, Dani Liu, was at the helm, Kathleen Lee had advised on the script and two of the hottest new talents in Hollywood – Madison White and Kiran Patel – were starring as the teenage leads, Jessica and Nick. Along with much of film reddit, Mia had spent the spring in an agony of anticipation, frantically scouring Variety and celebrity gossip sites for any news. But unlike those fans, she was getting a front row seat to the action. She was desperate for filming to start – and she longed more than anything to get work

experience on the movie. Eternally optimistic, she had polished up her CV, included every scrap of relevant experience, down to her stint as assistant director of the Year 3 play, and had sent it to Brooke’s email address that she had cajoled Josie into giving her. She hadn’t yet received a reply, but she wasn’t about to give up. Surely once the production team was in town, she could persuade them to hire her to do something.

And now, finally, the first trucks were rumbling into Fox Bay. Parts of the town had been roped off. Rooms had been reserved in every available Airbnb, and The Mariner’s Arms, the local pub owned by Simi and her very pregnant wife Lou, had undergone a swift refurbishment and was now entirely booked out for months. All the locals were buzzing about Hollywood descending on their sleepy streets. The Driftwood Café had already renamed its lattes after the lead characters, and the local paper, The Fox Bay Sentinel, had been publishing speculative updates almost daily. Only Old Bill, fisherman, sailor and Fox Bay’s unofficial mayor, remained decidedly unimpressed.

‘So they think they can film here, do they?’ he had said to Mia one morning, chewing on his pipe. ‘We’ll see about that.’

‘Brooke told Josie that the production team have all the permissions sorted with the council,’ said Mia. ‘I don’t imagine they’d have set up camp here without it all being signed off.’

‘Hmm,’ Old Bill said, with an enigmatic smile. ‘TV and film companies have tried to film here before, you know. I could tell you some stories. It’s not the council they have to get past, it’s me.’

‘Well, I’m sure they’ll be in touch,’ Mia had said soothingly. She was never sure whether Old Bill had delusions of grandeur, or whether he really was as important as he seemed to think. Although she did hope someone had checked with him. Not much happened in Fox Bay without his say-so, not even a multi-million-pound movie.

Mia had done her best to scout for information, even trying to ensnare Brooke in casual conversation, but Josie’s old lodger was maddeningly tight-lipped, striding along during her visits at a fast pace with her phone clamped to her ear in a way that discouraged conversation. At least the casting was top notch, Mia thought. Madison was gorgeous, funny and cool, and Kiran was a moody heartthrob incarnate. It would be pictureperfect casting.

But the lack of hard facts hadn’t stopped Fox Bay’s rumour mill from going into overdrive. Every local business insisted it was key to the production. The hardware shop claimed to be building props, the florist swore they had been asked to provide welcome bouquets for the stars’ rooms at Saintsbury Manor, the grand country house hotel a few miles away, and that Madison only wanted yellow roses. The teens of Fox Bay spent hours hanging out on the pier in their coolest, ‘oh I just threw this on’ outfits, hoping to get spotted as extras.

Mia had been busy with revision and exams, watching wistfully from afar but, now that her studying was over, she couldn’t wait to soak it all in. She wouldn’t give up on her dream of being involved in the film in some way, even if it

was just the chance to see a bit of the shoot for herself, or chat to someone from the crew about how it all worked up close. After all, it wasn’t every day Hollywood came to Fox Bay. She thought it was probably less practical than a lot of locations, but still, Mia could see why Brooke and Kathleen Lee had been so keen to film here. The book featured a windswept seaside town just like Fox Bay – a magical place where anything could happen, where love always got a second chance. It was perfect casting in its own way.

‘Movie magic,’ Mia whispered to herself, spinning once on the pavement before turning and heading up the steep lane to her house.

Her heart swelled as her little whitewashed cottage came into sight. One of the most pleasing things about her tumbledown home was how romantic it was. Mia could absolutely see her cottage starring in a romcom – Cameron Diaz might have escaped to it in The Holiday, perhaps, if she had house-swapped in Cornwall instead of Surrey. Or maybe it could have been the cottage where the Dashwood sisters had to move to when they lost their money. It had peeling blue shutters, a view of the harbour and tangled, hardy roses over the door. It was messy, constantly in disrepair and, to Mia’s eyes, perfect.

She pushed open the garden gate and strolled up the path, with its broken paving stones filled with weeds. She loved their pretty, overgrown garden, too – the apple tree that her mother optimistically promised to harvest every year, but which usually

ran to windfalls for the birds, the wiry sea buckthorn bush that had taken hold with its bright orange berries, the snarl of brambles and the long grass that Mia would lie on in the summer, head in a book.

Smiling, she put her key in the lock, hoping her family would be home to congratulate her on her final exam, make her a cup of tea and sit down to discuss her thrilling moviemagic summer over cake.

But as she started to push the door open, humming happily to herself, Mia heard it. A low, ominous hissing sound, like a hose left to run. Followed by . . . was that gurgling? Mia frowned. That didn’t sound right. In fact, it sounded very wrong indeed. She squeezed through the open door and froze. Her home was under water.