Shyla McCall dies by suicide, jumping from the Pearlman Bridge in Charleston with a fresh Auschwitz tattoo newly inked on her arm.

After Shyla's funeral, her parents George and Ruth Fox sue Jack for custody of his daughter Leah.

Jack wins the custody case thanks to a letter Shyla wrote before her death, then moves to Rome with Leah.

A private investigator hired by Shyla's sister Martha approaches Jack in Rome and asks him to meet with Martha.

Jack meets childhood friends Mike Hess and Ledare Ansley in Venice; Mike proposes a TV series about their hometown.

Leah tells Jack she has known for a long time that her mother died by suicide and wants to meet their family.

Jack receives a telegram confirming his mother Lucy has leukemia and decides to fly home to South Carolina.

Jack arrives at the hospital in South Carolina to find his mother Lucy unconscious in a coma.

A terrorist attack at the Rome airport leaves Jack shot multiple times and in a coma for six days.

Jordan Elliot rushes to the hospital after the shooting, and news cameras capture him praying over Jack, blowing his cover.

Jack and Leah fly to South Carolina, where Jack resolves to remain until his mother Lucy dies.

Leah meets her maternal grandparents Ruth and George Fox for the first time in South Carolina.

Ruth Fox shares her full story of surviving the Holocaust with Jack, including how she hid behind the Lady of the Coins statue.

Mike assembles Jack and his old friends at the Dock Street Theater for a mock trial to uncover Jordan's full story.

Jack and Ledare marry in Rome, with George and Ruth Fox playing a meaningful role in the wedding ceremony.

Beach Music follows Jack McCall, a cookbook writer living in Rome with his daughter Leah after the suicide of his wife Shyla. A series of crises—a threatening custody battle, his mother's leukemia diagnosis, and a violent terrorist attack—force Jack to return to South Carolina and confront everything he has been running from. In South Carolina, Jack slowly rebuilds his relationship with his family and begins the painful process of forgiving his late wife's parents, George and Ruth Fox, who once tried to take Leah from him. He listens to Ruth's and George's full accounts of surviving the Holocaust, which finally allows him to understand the trauma that shaped their parenting and, ultimately, Shyla's death. A mock trial assembled by their old friend Mike brings the full story of their college years and Jordan Elliot's crime into the open, allowing the group to move toward forgiveness. The novel ends with Jack marrying Ledare in Rome, surrounded by both families, with George and Ruth Fox standing beside him.

Jack McCall's journey from exile in Rome back to reconciliation with his past.

Jack visits Jordan at the Church of Saint Anselmo and warns him that Mike suspects Jordan is still alive.

Jack spots a photographer secretly taking pictures of Jordan from inside a confessional booth as he leaves the church.

Jordan shows Jack the photographs in a restaurant restroom and announces plans to move to a different monastery.

Jack has a tense dinner at Mike Hess's vacation home where Mike reveals Jordan's photos and unexpectedly invites Capers Middleton.

Jack visits Jordan's mother Celestine and is surprised to find General Elliot there, confronting them about photographs of Jordan.

Jack speaks with Ruth Fox for the first time since the custody battle, demanding she explain the meaning of Shyla's last words.

John Hardin blockades the town bridge with a gun; the McCall brothers strip naked and jump into the river to end the standoff.

Jack agrees to join Mike and Ledare's TV writing project before leaving South Carolina and flying back to Rome.

Lucy flies to Rome in December, celebrating Christmas Eve with Jack and Leah and attending midnight mass at St. Peter's.

General Elliot appears in the crowd outside Jack's apartment building when Jack returns home from the hospital after surgery.

Jack leads General Elliot on a decoy walk through Rome, exposing that the general has set a trap with Interpol agents.

John Hardin shocks the guests at Lucy's Labor Day party by presenting his dying mother a handmade coffin.

John Hardin secretly removes Lucy from the hospital, triggering a three-day search by the McCall brothers and local law enforcement.

Lucy decides to leave the hospital and die at home, and the family gathers to tell stories in her final hours.

After Lucy's funeral, Jack and Leah carry a motionless turtle hatchling into deep water, where it revives and swims away.

While the main plot of Beach Music tracks Jack's broad arc of grief and forgiveness, the novel's texture is built from a series of secondary events that deepen every strand of the story. In Rome, Jack navigates the dangerous business of protecting Jordan Elliot—warning him about Mike's suspicions, spotting a photographer at the confessional, and ultimately exposing General Elliot's attempt to trap his own son. Back in South Carolina, the McCall family dynamics play out in vivid, often chaotic scenes, from John Hardin's armed bridge standoff to Jack's uneasy agreement to join the TV project. Lucy's visit to Rome brings a rare moment of warmth before the Rome airport attack derails everything, and the family's vigil during her final illness is marked by both crisis and tenderness. John Hardin's desperate decision to smuggle Lucy out of the hospital captures the grief and love that all the brothers share but struggle to express. The pool closes with Lucy's death and the small but luminous image of a turtle hatchling reviving in deep water—a symbol of enduring love.

The hidden connections, confrontations, and quiet moments that moved the story forward.

Jack tells Leah his favorite story: dancing with Shyla to 'Save the Last Dance for Me' as a beach house collapsed into the ocean.

Martha Fox admits to Jack over dinner in Rome that her family was wrong to sue him for custody of Leah.

Father Jude travels from Mepkin Abbey to administer last rites to the comatose Lucy, weeping openly at her hospital bedside.

Family friend Max Rusoff tells Jack the story of surviving anti-Jewish violence in Ukraine and eventually emigrating to South Carolina.

Jack recalls the summer Jordan arrived in Waterford and the moment General Elliot struck Jordan in front of his friends after a baseball loss.

Leah and the McCall brothers dance the shag in South Carolina; Jack dances with Leah to Shyla's song and cries for the first time in years.

Lucy tells Jack that Father Jude, the Trappist monk, is actually her brother, a secret she has kept for decades.

Lucy reveals her true history to Jack: a childhood of poverty, sexual abuse, and an orphanage in the mountains of North Carolina.

Jack reflects on Shyla's childhood visions of the Lady of the Coins and realizes how deeply her parents' Holocaust trauma shaped her.

Lucy's leukemia comes out of remission; she asks Jack not to tell his brothers until after her Labor Day party.

At the mock trial, Jordan reveals that his father had him committed to a mental hospital where he was subjected to shock therapy.

Jordan confesses he built and detonated the bomb alone, not knowing two people were aboard the plane he destroyed.

Jack reveals to the group that he and Shyla got married the day after paddling Jordan across the border into Canada.

At the Dock Street Theater, Capers asks everyone for forgiveness and Jack reluctantly shakes his hand, choosing reconciliation over resentment.

General Elliot relocates to live near the prison where Jordan is sentenced, beginning a close father-son relationship for the first time.

Beach Music is a novel built on buried secrets, and Pool 3 collects the moments when those secrets finally surface. From the opening story Jack tells Leah about dancing with Shyla as the beach house washed into the sea, to the devastating revelations at the Dock Street Theater mock trial, each event in this pool marks a shift in what characters understand about themselves and each other. Lucy's disclosure that Father Jude is her brother, and her telling of her true impoverished childhood, reframes everything Jack thought he knew about his mother. Similarly, Jordan's testimony about the shock therapy inflicted on him by his father explains the rage that drove him to blow up the plane—and Jack's revelation that he and Shyla married the day after helping Jordan escape gives that act of loyalty its full weight. The pool traces the novel's central argument: that real forgiveness can only begin when people are finally willing to tell the truth about what happened to them, and to each other.

The discoveries, confessions, and emotional breakthroughs that unlocked the truth.