Book
Secrets and Promises
England, 1944. Bessie Rushbrook agrees to take in eight-year-old evacuee Marigold as flying bombs threaten London. To everyone around her, the child appears to be one more stranger displaced by war. Bessie knows otherwise. She made a promise to Marigold’s mother, Grace, and keeping it requires her to conceal a connection that reaches back to the First World War.
Marigold’s presence brings memories Bessie has suppressed for decades into daily family life. When Grace is injured in London, secrecy becomes harder to justify and Bessie must decide whether protecting the past is now doing more harm than revealing it. The novel moves between two wartime generations, using evacuation and the renewed danger to civilians in 1944 to reopen choices made when Bessie was young. Her confession threatens her marriage and family, but silence has begun to carry its own cost.
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