You just never know what tiny action is going to change your life. For restaurateur Annie Sharpe, it was forgetting her cellphone at the end of her shift. She backtracked to the restaurant, heard noises in the dark, and found her husband and one of the waitresses making love on the banquette at table nine.

Because this is a rom-com, you can guess what happens next: Annie takes off and somehow finds herself a gig house-sitting for the winter in a quaint seaside home in a quaint seaside village (this takes place in England) filled with quaint and colorful characters. The house is owned by a feisty but aging woman who has grown too frail to manage winters there, and Annie promises to look after everything.

But when the feisty woman's nephew, John, shows up — determined to get Annie to move out so he can redevelop the property — well, sparks of all kinds fly.

Highly implausible, downright predictable, but enormously entertaining, this manages to be escapism of the highest order.

A Season for Second Chances

By: Jenny Bayliss.

Jenny Bayliss

Publisher: Putnam, 436 pages, $16.