"How can I truthfully tell you I'm sorry, when the worst thing I ever did has turned out to be the best?"
Bridget feels compromised. By marrying Anthony Harper and moving to Wildings, his family home for three generations, she's abandoned her urban roots for rural affluence and comfort she hasn't earned. As Anthony becomes increasingly difficult and their marriage founders, she immerses herself in her new career as gardener and designer. Conscience urges her to leave him; but with her identity and status so closely bound to the garden she knows intimately, how can she? Soon circumstances mean that a split with Anthony is at first essential, then impossible ...
When Meg, a young stonemason, rents a workshop at Wildings, she wants only to be independent and alone. In the exacting craft of cutting letters in stone she finds meaning and purpose, her one true thing. But in spite of her resolve to avoid emotional attachments, she's drawn into intense relationships: with Bridget and with Adam, another artist-in-residence whose confident manner and bold abstract paintings mask deep inner conflict. She finds herself caught between competing claims of loyalty, trust and desire.
A generation on, Jane, the youngest Harper daughter, is left aimless and adrift when Anthony dies suddenly, with the surprise in his Will that he had another son, unknown to the family. Now Wildings must be sold. Everything is in turmoil - work, home, her on-off relationship with Tom. Who is the stranger who's to inherit a third of the estate? Where will she go, and how will she face the future alone? Aware that Meg and her mother each had an absorbing focus for their energy and passion, she is unsure where to find her own - but without it, what's the purpose of her life?
Now far from Wildings, but bound by a promise to support Jane, Meg is unable to be honest about the secrets she knows from both parents - or thinks she knows. Having thought of herself as the observer who saw everything, she's forced to realise how much she failed to see - and the cost to herself and to those she loves.
When the ground shifts, where is one true thing to be found?
