Inside a Benedictine monastery on Egret Island, off the South Carolina coast, is a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion. It is to Egret Island that Jessie Sullivan, a woman whose life has been constrained by circumstances, to care for her mother, who hasn't yet recovered from Jessie's father's death 33 years before. As Jessie contemplates the separation...