They gave her one year to learn her place. They seated her behind a pillar at her own wedding. Elara Quinn married into the richest shipping dynasty on the coast, and her mother-in-law made sure she knew she didn't belong. Cold tea. A wrong room. A necklace planted in her bag in front of four hundred guests. They called her a nobody. They had no idea she owned the harbor. One year later, the Valemonts are finally her family. Then a buried clause in an old trust surfaces, and the day her baby is born, everything she built can be taken from her. The man who filed it has an Ashcroft name and a smile that gives nothing away. And the one person who might know why is the mother-in-law who once tried to break her is. Some secrets sink a family. Some are the reason it was ever held together. Heiress of the Harbor Light. Underestimated. Overlooked. Unstoppable.

Tessa Bryant walks with a cane and a limp, and everyone at Whitmore Academy has an opinion about both. The scholarship girl keeps her head down and pours everything into the songs she writes in a battered notebook.Then a cruel prank pushes her onto the stage of Rising Voices, the biggest teen singing competition in America. The whole country is about to hear what she's been hiding.Jax Mercer, the playboy who started the joke, never expected to be silenced by her voice. Eli Navarro, the quiet keyboardist, always knew she could sing.Tessa has been underestimated all her life. Now she must decide whose applause she wants, and whether a heart that learned to survive is brave enough to be loved.