his is a story about Alice Chambers, who moved into a house that once belonged to the writer Rachel Danbury and who, in doing so, discovered something about herself, her marriage, and her capacity for love. Who changed her life.

Rachel Danbury was a writer who moved to the town of Highfield in the late 1930s. Long after Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald spent a summer in the neighboring town of Westport, Rachel was part of a thriving artistic community of ex-Manhattanites who had escaped to the suburbs and beyond, looking for a more relaxed, peaceful way of living.

She wrote two novels that disappeared without trace, but her third, The Winding Road, caused a huge scandal, a scandal that ultimately forced her to move away from the town she loved, to a place where nobody would know who she was.

For Rachel Danbury wrote about her life. She wrote about her marriage, about her womanizing husband, Jefferson, and about her love for a man named Edward Rutherford.

She wrote about a small town in Connecticut called Highfield, about the people who lived there, the people who considered themselves friends. She exposed the town and its inhabitants with warmth and humor, but with dangerously sharp accuracy, and they never forgave her for the betrayal.

Rachel Danbury tried to ignore her husband’s infidelities. She told herself he was simply possessed of extraordinary charm, but when he had an affair with a woman called Candice Carter, a former starlet for Paramount and owner of the town theater, she could no longer pretend she didn’t know what was going on.

Rachel sought solace, and revenge, in the arms of Edward Rutherford, a neighbor who had always been pleasant, had always been willing to stop for a chat, and until Rachel set out to—successfully—seduce him, nothing more.

But Rachel and Edward fell in love, and eventually Rachel had to make a choice between a love that was more meaningful than anything she had ever known and her husband.

She chose her husband.

And for the rest of her life Rachel learned to turn a blind eye. She learned to switch off the light in her bedroom, trying not to think of the fact that her husband was not lying beside her, trying not to think about where he was or whom he might be with.

The story of Rachel and Jefferson became famous in America in the 1940s. Everyone in Highfield knew the people involved, and for years the house in which Rachel and Jefferson lived—even after Rachel sold it—was thought to have a curse. Does history repeat itself? The cottage changed hands several times, and then Alice Chambers and her philandering husband, Joe, moved in.

And this is where Alice’s story starts.