Seeking atonement over her guilt that she caused her sister's paralysis, Eleanor takes a job caring for an elderly woman and becomes caught up in the woman's life of passion, danger, heartache, and deception in Hungary during World War II.

"It's been nine years since Larkin fled Georgetown, South Carolina, vowing never to go back. But when she finds out that her mother has disappeared, she knows she has no choice but to return to the place that she both loves and dreads--and to the family and friends who never stopped wishing for her to come home. Ivy, Larkin's mother, is discovered in the burned out wreckage of her family's ancestral rice plantation, badly injured and unconscious....