Winter, 1865. A fierce blizzard rages across the Kentucky hills as Hugh Worthington, master of the ancestral home Spring Bank, sits alone with his memories. He is a man marked by old grief, the loss of a childhood companion whose death haunts him still, and by the weight of expectations both societal and self-imposed. Then comes a knock at the door. In the snow, near death, a young woman named Adah Hastings clutches her child, her past a mystery, her present desperate. What begins as an act of rescue becomes something far more complicated: a test of Hugh's capacity for compassion, a confrontation with the man he was and the man he might become. Holmes weaves a tale where tenderness and tragedy intertwine, where a stranger's arrival cracks open the hardened shell of a man who had stopped hoping. This is fiction in the grand sentimental tradition, politely devastating, quietly radical in its insistence that redemption is possible, even for those who believe themselves beyond it.
