The islands do not keep their promises. Everyone on the coast knows it, and still they come to Thomasin Ostrey, the seed keeper who sails the far chain and brings back the growing things a heart cannot bear to lose. A mother's herbs. A wedding vine. The one plant that still smells like someone gone.

This time it is a rose.

The widow Marget Callis wants back her late husband's prize climbing rambler, and it grows now on storm battered Halveryn, where the autumn gales are already sealing the crossings one by one. But the rose is not for sale. It thrives in the walled garden of Jory Trewhella, the lighthouse keeper who has not spoken his grief aloud in years. That rose is the last living thing his lost love ever tended, and he would sooner drown than cut it.

Thomasin cannot buy this one. She has to earn it, and the only way is to coax a shut up man back toward the living before the last safe tide.

Then, pressed in the island's old planting books, she finds a hand she almost knows. Her own mother's.

For readers who love warm, atmospheric, place rich historical fiction, a gentle journey across wind and water, where a broken man is mended, a longed for thing is earned, and one woman begins to find her way home.