Belgium, 1911. Désirée Saura is fifteen — the daughter of a Spanish fortune that can buy her a place in any great house in Europe, but never a name to belong in one. Sent to a château in the Ardennes to teach music to an English earl's daughters, she is the outsider: foreign, Catholic, new money. And there is Percy, the earl's heir, who loses his heart the rainy afternoon he first sees her — and spends four summers not daring to say so.
Then the war comes. It takes Percy into the sky in one of the fragile new flying machines, and Désirée into an occupied country, carrying men's lives in the hem of her coat. Two countries and a casualty list stand between them — and a music box, a lock of gold hair, and the letters of a man learning to say in another tongue what he cannot say in his own.
Sixty years on, an old woman opens that box at last, to tell the whole truth: the love, the war, and the one thing she got wrong and carried, without knowing it, for the rest of her life.
For readers of Kristin Hannah, Kate Morton and Lucinda Riley.