48-year-old Nantucketer Dabney Kimball Beech has always had a gift for matchmaking. Some call her ability mystical, while others - like her husband, celebrated economist John Boxmiller Beech, and her daughter, Agnes, who is clearly engaged to the wrong man - call it meddlesome, but there's no arguing with her results: With 42 happy couples to her credit and all of them still together, Dabney has never been wrong about romance. Never, that is, except...

The story of the couple's youthful passion and ambition interwoven with a portrait of a marriage, thirty-plus years later, a lifetime's shared compromises, secrets, betrayals, and mutual love.

Inheriting a London house from an unknown relative, Julia begins work on the house at the side of an alluring antiques dealer before discovering an old painting that reveals the house's shrouded history and the story of a mid-nineteenth-century woman trapped in a loveless marriage.