When Lucia Carew's mother departs to nurse her ailing husband, nineteen-year-old Lucia inherits five step-siblings and a household she never asked to manage. Her summer of freedom with her cousins, already tantalizingly close, dissolves into a fog of cooking, cleaning, and pacifying children who are not hers by blood. Resentment festers. She had wanted so little: a few weeks of lightness before adulthood closed in. But then Evan, her youngest stepbrother, falls gravely ill, and Lucia must confront something far more difficult than household chores. She must confront herself. What emerges is not the martyring tableau of Victorian hagiography but something more honest: the painful, reluctant birth of genuine love. Lucia learns that trust, once given, transforms both the giver and receiver, and that the shackles we resent often become the foundations we build upon.
