Some love stories are chosen. Hers was written a hundred years before she would live it. An epic World War II historical romance that sweeps from the hills of South India to the cotton fields of Georgia, from the ruins of Italy to the burning river fords of Persia — bound by an ancient stone and a love the war could not kill. In a burning village in 1845, dying people broke an ancient jade stone in two and carried one half across the black water into the unknown, keeping a single promise: that one day it would find the two souls it was made for, and no ocean, no war, no turning of the world would keep them apart. Georgia, 1941. Rose Ashford Vale wears that half at her throat and believes it only a keepsake. She is the brightest girl in the county, and everywhere her yellow dress goes, two young men follow: golden Ray Dalton, adored and certain she will be his, and quiet Jack Mercer, who has never once mistaken her dazzling smile for her heart. The county calls them the two shadows. Rose calls it a choice she is in no hurry to make. But the stone at her throat doesn't care what the county expects, or what Ray has planned. It was made to find the two who are fated to see clear through — and its long wait is nearly over. Then the war comes for them all, flinging Rose and both her shadows to the far ends of the earth — and the stone begins, at last, to wake. When grief arrives with a story she cannot make herself believe, Rose takes up the bright mask that once caged her, wears it now like a blade, and sets out to cross a world that was never built for a woman to cross. The oldest magic in the world is not to be loved. It is to be seen.
