It has been eight years since pharmacist and longtime spinster Ave Maria Mulligan married coal miner Jack MacChesney. What she hasn't counted on is that fate and the ghosts of the past will come to haunt her, and test the love she has for her husband.

Transporting readers from the Blue Ridge Mountains in Southwest Virginia to the Italian Alps, New York City and the Tuscan countryside, this novel is the story of a shifting mother daughter relationship.

Seismic changes are about to take place in Ave Maria's life. Her daughter, Etta, barely eighteen, is married and living in Italy; the health of her husband, the gorgeous and ever-dependable Jack Mac, is failing and she has scarcely noticed; friendships she has enjoyed forever are under threat. And then to town comes a mysterious stranger, revealing a long-buried secret. Her world shaken, Ave Maria must face up to the past in order to build a new life for herself and for Jack.