What would happen if you just slipped away? Could you leave everything familiar behind to become someone else—living a different life in a different place without anyone noticing? That’s a question Olivia Nash never knew she had—until she began to answer it.

Her son has slipped away on a summer internship at a Michigan camp. Her husband, Nate, has slipped away on an extended assignment in Montreal, too wrapped up in a high-stakes merger to include her.

It’s not that she intended to run away—if that’s what you want to call it. But smartphones and distracted, disinterested people make it surprisingly easy to telecommute in your role as wife, mother, sister, and friend. Where you are is irrelevant. Until where you are begins to change who you are.

Back in a place from her past—on an island that lives in the past, Olivia creates a parallel life with an unlikely assortment of people: a troubled college student; the wise and lonely owner of the island’s bookstore; Chef, older now—but is he still the temperamental culinary prodigy she remembers from that long-ago summer ? And then there’s the mysterious owner of a cottage, known only to her in emails as Frankie, who invites her to refurbish the neglected house, giving Olivia a place where she can reimagine her life and her calling at the same time.

You might be able to slip away from your life for a summer. It’s not clear if just as easily, you can slip back into the life you left behind—when the season ends.