When thirty-year-old English teacher Anna Emerson is offered a job tutoring T.J. Callahan at his family's summer rental in the Maldives, she accepts without hesitation ; a working vacation on a tropical island trumps the library any day. T.J. Callahan has no desire to leave town, not that anyone asked him. He's almost seventeen and if having cancer wasn't bad enough, now he has to spend his first summer in remission with his family -- and a stack of overdue assignments -- instead of his friends. Anna and T.J. are en route to join T.J.'s family in the Maldives when the pilot of their airplane suffers a fatal heart attack and crash-lands in the Indian Ocean ....