Annie Ferguson was a bright young Manhattan architect. Talented, beautiful, just starting out with her first job, new apartment and boyfriend, she had the world in the palm of her hand, until a single phone call altered the course of her life forever. Overnight, she became the mother to her sister's three orphaned children, keeping a promise she never regretted making, even if it meant putting her own life indefinitely on hold.

When her life of privilege is upended by a terrorist attack that ends her parents' lives, a college senior struggles to rebuild on her own terms, learning uplifting and heartbreaking life lessons throughout a series of relationships and opportunities.

"Abandoned by her mother at age seven, Alexandra Winslow took solace in the mystery stories she read with her devoted father--and soon she was writing them herself, slowly graduating to dark, violent, complex crime stories that reflected skill and imagination far beyond her years. After her father's early death, at fourteen Alex is taken in by the nuns of a local convent, where she finds twenty-six mothers to take the place of the one she lost, and...