Nearly forty years ago, Lark Burstyn fell in love on the sandbars of the Missouri River and ran from the only boy who ever truly saw her. In the summer of 1986, Lark and Kurt Steele were part of a dazzling, reckless circle of friends who spent their last golden nights before adulthood south of Bismarck—skinny dipping in the river, dirt biking through the cottonwoods, drinking from a keg beside the fire, and believing the future would wait for them. Then Ruby Hawthorne, the group’s beloved cheerleader, was found dead near the water, and everything they thought they knew about love, loyalty, and innocence broke apart. Now, decades later, the friends return from their polished Twin Cities lives for one final reunion at the old river bottoms. They come carrying marriages, divorces, griefs, children, careers, and secrets worn smooth by time. But when Ruby’s former boyfriend, Trey Holland, is found dead after the party, the past stops feeling like memory and starts feeling like evidence. For Lark and Kurt, the reunion awakens something even more dangerous than suspicion: the love they never buried properly. As old truths rise from the river and the friends begin to question what really happened in 1986, Lark must decide whether the life she built away from Kurt was survival—or simply a long detour back to him. Tender, nostalgic, and emotionally sweeping, In My Life is a later-in-life second-chance romance about first love, unfinished grief, and the rare kind of soulmate connection that time can wound but never erase.