Lady Eleanor Vance has been in mourning for two years. Since her husband, the Lord of Blackwood Manor, met his unfortunate end, her life has been a study in quiet routine: managing the estate, enduring the suffocating condolences of the local gentry, and walking the grounds at dusk when the world feels still enough to bear.

It is during one such walk that the impossible happens.

With a sound like tearing silk and a flash of blinding light, a person simply appears in her overgrown walled garden. Clad in the most bizarre, immodest, and utterly foreign garments she has ever witnessed, speaking in a dialect that is English, yet not.

Every rational instinct screams demon, fairy trick, or madness. But the stranger is bleeding. And Eleanor, despite her loneliness and her fear, has not yet forgotten how to be kind.

She hides you. She tends to you. And she listens to your impossible story of a future she cannot fathom. In you, she sees a world beyond the suffocating cage of her widowhood. In her, you see your only anchor in a dangerous, unfamiliar past.

But the longer you stay, the more she realizes she cannot let you return. Not when you are the most interesting thing to have happened in her entire life.