The year Susannah Nelson turned eighteen changed everything: her boyfriend, Jake, left her unexpectedly, and her brother died in a car accident months later. At fifty, Susannah finds herself regretting the paths not taken. Long married, a mother and a teacher, she  should  be happy. But she feels there’s something missing in her life, although she doesn’t know exactly what. Not only that, she’s balancing the demands of a temperamental twenty-year-old daughter and an aging mother who now needs her help. When Susannah goes home to Colville, Washington, to look after her mother, she decides to try to find out what happened to Jake all those years ago. In returning to her parents’ house, her girlhood friends and the garden she’s always loved, Susannah also returns to the past—and the choices she made back then.