In her first life, Ida Russell had been a painter. But now she is Ida Pease, wife to Ezra, a once-charming man who has become an inattentive and altogether unreliable husband. Ezra runs a salvage company in town with his business partner, Mose Barstow, and Ida has left her love for painting behind. It comes as no surprise to Ida when Ezra is hours late for a Thanksgiving dinner, only to leave abruptly for another supposedly urgent business trip to Boston. But then a storm strikes, the ship carrying Ezra and Mose sinks, and they are presumed dead. As she settles the affairs of Ezra’s estate with Henry Barstow, Mose’s brother and executor, Ida must learn to separate truth from lies and what matters from what doesn’t.

After the death of her beloved mother, Martha Jefferson spent five years abroad with her father, Thomas Jefferson, on his first diplomatic mission to France. Now, at 17, Jefferson’s eldest daughter is returning to the lush hills of the family’s beloved Virginia plantation, Monticello. While the large, beautiful estate is the same as she remembers, Martha has changed. The young girl who sailed to Europe is now a woman with a heart made heavy by a first love gone wrong. As her life becomes constrained by the demands of marriage, motherhood, politics, scandal and her family’s increasing impoverishment, Martha yearns to find her way back to the gentle beauty and quiet happiness of the world she once knew at the top of her father’s “little mountain.”