Rosemary Thorne has spent twelve years talking to her dead husband's photograph. She is seventy-five years old, owner of Willowbrook's apothecary, and she has not taken off her wedding ring since Thomas died.

She tells herself she is content. The truth is simpler and harder: she is terrified.

Then Katerina Volkov arrives—a two-hundred-year-old archivist with guilt in her eyes and a request Rosemary wants to refuse: permission to rent the warehouse next door. The warehouse Thomas designed before he died. The warehouse Rosemary has kept empty for twelve years, unable to sell it, unable to enter it, unable to let it be anything other than a monument to what she lost.

When Rosemary finally steps inside, she discovers Thomas's secret workshop. His research. His journals. And the truth that rewrites everything: Thomas knew he was cursed. He knew who cursed him. And he forgave her.

The woman standing at Rosemary's door is the reason Thomas died.

And Rosemary is falling in love with her.

Because forgiveness, it turns out, is not the ending of grief. It is the beginning of something else entirely—messy and complicated and terrifying and necessary. And the Heart of Rowan they are restoring together demands sacrifice: ten years of life for every curse broken, freely given by someone who loves you.

Rosemary would have given those years to save Thomas. He chose to die rather than let her make that sacrifice. Now she must decide: will she honor his memory by keeping herself frozen in grief? Or will she honor his gift by choosing to live again—even if that means loving the woman whose mistake took him away?