Mary Schramski

WAKE UP! WAKE UP! LIFE IS HAPPENING WHILE YOU SLEEP…

Melinda had never questioned her perfect life. Why should she? Her husband's successful, she's not working for the first time in years and their only daughter is in college. Her father–a workaholic, perfectionist, runner and health nut to boot–is happy and healthy, too.

Or so Melinda thought until her father quite literally falls out of bed. Suddenly her formerly robust parent is in jeopardy, and their roles are reversed. Melinda's life changes in the blink of an eye.

But with the changes, unexpected blessings come her way, too. Because as she and her father bond, Melinda realizes she's been sleeping through life–and starts discovering what really matters….

I've never been close with my father…

Even though I'm his only child. We were both held together by my mother, the warm, dancing flame attracting the quiet moths. Dad was always on the other side of the sun; I could never reach him.

Now Mom's gone. It's Christmas. And my unapproachable father is chasing a wild, crazy, impossible dream. He's putting everything he has into restoring an old, abandoned lighthouse that Mom loved.

Yet, after a while, something about restoring the landmark started to make sense. Because in the glow of that beacon, a wife and mother was not gone, but instead was showing her two most treasured people the way toward peace.

She'd never had a real home…

So it had never been about "what to keep" in her life; she'd not experienced that luxury. Then Juliette Carlton got a call, one that said she'd inherited a fortune–and could she please claim it? Juliette didn't know what to do. She was a down-on-her-luck Las Vegas card dealer with $38 in her bank account.

Had she hit the jackpot? Or was it just another loss?

At first it seemed the latter. The "fortune" was a dilapidated 140-year-old antebellum house that belonged to an uncle she barely remembered. Beneath layers of dust, every inch of the ancestral home was shrouded in secrets–secrets that would put in doubt everything Juliette ever thought she knew.

She would have to decide what to give away. But along the way, she found what to keep….