As a young Japanese boy recovers from a bad chill, his mother busily folds origami paper into delicate silver cranes in preparation for the boy's very first Christmas.

Maddy Morton is used to being on the run. . . .

Years ago, she ran away from home with a man her parents warned would be the ruin of her. Now she's on the run again, with her ten-year-old son, Nicholas, to escape that man, her abusive ex-husband, Gabe. Destitute, angry, and determined never to trust a man again, Maddy returns to the only place she's always felt safe—home. That means facing Jesse, her depressed father, who told her never

"He's a gambler at best. A con artist at worst," her aunt had said of the handlebar-mustached man who snatched Ella Wallace away from her dreams of studying art in France. Eighteen years later, that man has disappeared, leaving Ella alone and struggling to support her three sons. While the world is embroiled in World War I, Ella fights her own personal battle to keep the mystical Florida land that has been in her family for generations from the