The hill crested gently, practically parallel with the sighing waves that gilded the horizon-line. The dry heat of summer was slowly winding to a close, the heavily golden fruits of autumn hanging off gnarled branches like lanterns, weighing down the air. The world was preparing for a long-awaited sleep, settling in resignedly to the faded mist of twilight. The end of a grand age. The wind, however still danced and raced with itself as it always had, until it encountered a huddled mas

PROLOGUE              December stole the breath from her lungs.             Two weeks before my birthday, the sky shook out a glorious smattering of snow right onto my grandmother’s beloved garden. Slightly overweight and unwieldy in my growing body, I had gone outside to look at the lacey frost that had heralded my arrival eight years before.             “