The new schoolmarm in the one-room school outside Cedar Ridge, Washington, hardly matched the rough and tumble country kids' expectations. Trinity Mason was college educated, pretty and petite, and the sternest taskmaster they had known! Likewise, the isolated country school was the last place Trinity envisioned herself. Committed to her grandmother's belief that the torch of learning must be passed from one generation to the next, Trinity perseveres. However, a chance meeting at a family party with the rugged logger and farmer Will Thatcher makes Trinity forever thankful God led her there. Together Will and Trinity carve a life in the Washington wilderness despite natural disaster, disease, and the Great Depression.

Theirs was a wartime romance, a wisp of a breeze in the sultry South Pacific, a promise made amid threats of invasion and attack. World War II would go on with or without them but their lives would be forever changed by its course. Candleshine Thatcher had wanted to be a nurse for as long as she could remember and now at last her skills would be used to the utmost. Lieutenant Jeffery Fairfax wanted this war to end so he could go back to his beloved ranch in Montana. Their meeting is coincidental, their goodbye almost inevitable.