What Tomorrow Will Be: A Novel

by Julianne MacLean

Genres: Women's Fiction; Second Chance Romance

Synopsis

From USA Today bestselling author Julianne MacLean comes a captivating tale of a life caught between the past and the present...and a true love unbound by space and time.

Some loves never die. But only one will shape her future...

At nineteen, Sienna MacKay believed she had it all—a promising career ahead of her and a young love destined to last forever. But a tragic accident shatters that idyllic existence, leaving her with a heartbreaking loss.

Years later, Sienna has rebuilt her life. She's a successful designer, a devoted mother, and a woman who has dared to love again—with Nate, a passionate, rising-star chef. But as Nate drifts further into ambition, cracks surface in their once-bright marriage. A stormy confrontation ends in disaster, and Sienna becomes caught between two worlds—her near-perfect past and her more complicated present—where she must ask herself: What is the price of true love...and is she willing to pay?

Set on the majestic, rugged coastline of Nova Scotia, What Tomorrow Will Be is a magical, emotional novel about first love, second chances, and finding the courage to stay...or the will to go.

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Release date: February 3, 2026

Publisher: Lake Union Publishing

Sample

Prologue

When I was nineteen, I’d thought I had it all figured out. I’d found my soulmate, the great love of my life, and I was on a clear, direct path to the career of my dreams. What could possibly go wrong? My life was golden—until I went for a hike in the winter sunshine, and fell off a mountain.

I wish I could say I’d learned a lot from the ordeal—that when the ground collapsed under my feet and I tumbled down a vertical rockface, I’d come to understand that life isn’t always steady or predictable. I also wish that afterward, I could have recognized the long-term power and potency of trauma. How, for the rest of your life, lingering scars can steer you off course and make you doubt that anything good is truly lasting.

I’d absorbed no such wisdom that day, nor in the months and years that followed. Even when death came calling a second time, I had not yet recognized my ignorance.

But there I go again, dwelling on the past when this is supposed to be a story about love, forgiveness, and soulmates, and not just the human kind.

It’s a story about lessons learned—that there can be joy after tragedy, and hope after forgiveness.

There is growth in the healing.

But maybe that’s something you learn from life, over decades. Not from a fleeting encounter with death, however intense it may be.