It is a fire in a New Hampshire hotel that brings Nicholas Van Tassel and Etna Bliss together - two strangers grateful to have escaped the burning building with their lives. For Nicholas, it is also a chance meeting that lights up a lifelong passion, and sets in motion a pursuit of Etna that is to end in their marriage.
But their life in the college town of Thrupp is not everything they could have imagined. Many years later, on a train bound for Florida, Nicholas recounts their courtship, and their time together. And as the threads of the story begin to unravel, what is revealed is a patchwork of promises, truths, secrets and lies, and a man, madly in love, for whom his wife is all he ever wanted . . .
