Growing up in a hardscrabble West Virginia mining town, Melody Logan often wished that her flighty, movie-star-gorgeous mother, Haille, wasn't so unhappy. But in the warmth of her wonderful father's unwavering love, Melody always felt safe and secure - until a dreadful mining accident tore her from her family's moorings.
Melody was still devastated by her father's death when she came home from school to find her mother gaily packing suitcases. Soon after, they drove off with her mother's loathsome friend, Archie Marlin. Haille was finally ready to try her luck as a model or actress, but first they would stop on Cape Cod to visit with her father's family - the family of which he had never spoken.
Melody had barely met her cousins - handsome Cary, whose twin sister, Laura, had recently been killed in a tragic sailing accident, and May, a sweet, deaf ten-year-old - when her mother stunned her with the news that Melody was to stay on the Cape while she and Archie continued on the road.
Marooned among virtual strangers, Melody felt utterly alone, with only her old fiddle to comfort her. She knew Cary resented her using Laura's room and wearing Laura's clothes, although she did so only at her aunt's insistence. But at school, when vicious gossips taunted her with ugly rumors, she found an unexpected ally in Cary. And on Melody's first desperately uncomfortable visit with her tyrannical Grandmother Olivia and Grandfather Samuel, it was Cary who finally began to reveal the truth about her parents - a sad, shocking story of defiant love that only deepened her confusion. Yet Melody knew nothing of the dark deceptions that would soon surface...or of the devastating betrayals she would face before she glimpsed the faint, beckoning lights of a safe harbor...