We return to Finn's story, picking up shortly after The Teardrop Game left off.

May has only been married for a handful of years when she discovers some unpleasant truths about her husband. The fallout leaves her alone and homeless, with few options beyond moving to South Dakota to live with her older sister, Taylor. Taylor has a small horse training operation and is both independent and set in her ways.

With May's arrival the two sisters have to learn to live side by side again. Old tensions surface and May slowly comes to the understanding that their memories of their shared childhood conflict more often than they align. What May remembers as a happy childhood, Taylor regards as a series of heartbreaks.

They struggle not to let the past influence the present as May learns the ropes and starts to get used to horses again, trying to help and stay out of the way at the same time. But when Taylor makes a series of bad decisions that start to lead her down a road that could ruin all her hard-earned success, May has to decide whether to risk her sister's wrath by intervening, or flee the scene and find a fresh start elsewhere.

Finn is 10 years old when he finds a carved wooden pillbox among his mother's belongings. When he touches the worn wood he experiences a cross between deja vu and putting his hand too close to a candle. Unable to get an explanation from his mother, he hides the box in his desk drawer.

Immediately, Finn’s life begins to change. He dreams every night of a woman trapped in a grove of aspens. When he’s awake he experiences visions. Sometimes he sees a tangled jungle and smells ginger. Other times its cobbled streets and horse-drawn carriages. He can’t shake the feeling that these scenes are somehow his own memories.

As Finn struggles to understand the relationship between the box, his nightly dream, and his visions, strange forces gather around him. Every few months a man with a greasy ponytail appears in the night and circles Finn's apartment, sniffing the air and examining the walls.

When a young British tutor arrives and offers to help fill in some of the blanks, Finn’s world turns upside down. Although Mr. Stellar appears (almost) ordinary on the surface, he proves capable of driving away the man with the ponytail. He also gives Finn a magical board-game. Playing the game starts Finn down the path to solving the mysteries of the pillbox. As Finn learns what is truly at stake he will have to make a choice: try to live an ordinary life, or abandon his mother and attempt to free the woman in the grove?

Meanwhile, the man with the ponytail is searching, and he’s not planning a rescue mission. He wants to find the grove to exact revenge for something Finn did centuries ago in Puerto Rico - something the boy will have to come to terms with before he can consider himself the good guy.

John Dane's life takes a turn for the unepected when a stranger brings him an African Gray parrot that once belonged to John's long-dead father. The bird doesn't speak but has memoriezed every word of the musical Les Miserables, and sings snippets of the songs constantly.

John is not thrilled with his new roommate at first, but that is only because he doesn't know the bird is the key to unraveling the mystery at the core of his life. What the bird helps him learn about his past will shed new light on the accident that took the lives of John's parents, but more importantly it will influence the present. John will discover that he is not just another normal guy, but the end-result of his brilliant father's work in genetics.

The riddle of John's genes attracts the interest of others as well. As two large but shadowy forces face off to secure the secret in John's DNA, John runs. He then faces a hard question. Spend his life hiding himself and his secret, or turn himself over to the medical community so they can study his body? And if he opts for the latter choice, how does he know who to trust?

Beauty is not beautiful. The midwives gossip about her, wondering what possibly could have gone wrong. The girl is soft on the outside, as if she was born before she was quite ready to face the world. As if her mother started dying even before the long labor killed her.

But Beauty's father calls her Beauty anyway, and when her name attracts the attention of a handsome stranger who owes her father a debt, Beauty is invited to stay in his magical house at the heart of a magical wood while her father travels.

At the house, Beauty hides behind a heavy veil. The handsome man thinks her modest at first, but grows frustrated when she will not remove the veil, even to dine.

Surrounded by a house of magic and elegance and faced always with the handsome man, Beauty feels uglier than ever. She has not yet learned there is more than one way to be beautiful, and that the handsome man's lovely face hides a curse and a secret even more shocking than her own.