The New York Times bestselling author of A Long Time Gone now explores a Southern familys buried history, which will change the life of the woman who unearths it, secret by shattering secret. It has been two years since the death of Merritt Heywards husband, Cal, when she receives unexpected news—Cals family home in Beaufort, South Carolina, bequeathed by Cals reclusive grandmother, now belongs to Merritt.Charting the course of an uncertain life—and feeling guilt from her husbands tragic death—Merritt travels from her home in Maine to Beaufort, where the secrets of Cals unspoken-of past reside among the pluff mud and jasmine of the ancestral Heyward home on the Bluff. This unknown legacy, now Merritts, will change and define her as she navigates her new life—a new life complicated by the arrival of her too young stepmother and ten-year-old half-brother.
