Meet Me In Malta by Joy Skye

One birthday. One island escape. One second chance she never expected.

On the eve of her fiftieth birthday, Belinda McGuire’s life implodes when her marriage ends and her carefully built future disappears overnight. Rather than endure sympathy and small talk back home, she escapes to a historic villa in Valletta, Malta, hoping sun, space, and time will help her breathe again.

She doesn’t expect the villa’s chef to be Noah, her childhood neighbor and first love, now older, steadier, and impossible to ignore. As shared memories resurface over Mediterranean meals, Belinda begins to imagine a life that looks nothing like the one she lost.

But when her grown children, estranged sister, and inconvenient ex-husband arrive, old wounds and misunderstandings threaten to derail everything. Caught between the past she survived and the future she might still claim, Belinda must decide whether Malta is simply an escape, or the place where her life truly begins again.