On a glorious summer's day in 1980, five friends stumble upon an abandoned lakeside cottage hidden deep in the heart of the English countryside. Isolated and rundown, it offers a retreat, somewhere they can escape from the real world. For Kat, it's a stay of execution: living there for a year will surely give Simon the time to fall in love with her. For Simon, the cottage is a way to avoid his parents'expectations and his impending legal career. For all of them, it's a chance to live the dream, with lazy summer days by the lake and intimate winter evenings around the fire. But as the seasons change, tensions begin to rise and when an unexpected visitor appears at their door, nothing will ever be the same again . Three decades later, Lila arrives at the remote cottage. Bruised from a tragic accident and with her marriage in crisis, she finds renovating the tumbledown house gives her a renewed sense of purpose.

Little by little she wonders about the cottage's previous inhabitants. How did they manage in such isolation? And why did they leave in such a hurry, with their belongings still strewn about the place and, even worse, a bullet hole evident in a kitchen beam? Most disturbing of all, why can't she shake the feeling that someone might be watching her? The bestselling author of Secrets of the Tides returns with a spellbinding tale of grief, jealousy and betrayal.