A woman's homecoming, a family secret and an old house that holds the key to a shocking legacy... After years abroad, Lucy returns home from Japan. At a crossroads in her life, she is newly haunted by her father's unresolved death a decade ago. Late one night, as she paces the hallways of her family's rambling lakeside house, she discovers, locked in a window seat, a collection of objects that first appear to be idle curiosities, but soon reveal a complex family history. Old longings stirred up by her passionate first love soon lead her into the unexpected. And as Lucy discovers and explores the traces of her past, the family story she has always known is shattered - and then dramatically reconfigured, emboldening her to live with a freedom she has never known before.

It should have been an ordinary birth, the start of an ordinary happy family. But the night Dr David Henry delivers his wife's twins is a night that will haunt five lives for ever. For though David's son is a healthy boy, his daughter has Down's syndrome. And, in a shocking act of betrayal whose consequences only time will reveal, he tells his wife their daughter died while secretly entrusting her care to a nurse. As grief quietly tears apart David's family, so a little girl must make her own way in the world as best she can.