Turncoat Hearts

Richmond, 1859

Genevieve Coiron has crossed half a continent for this day - to watch John Thaddeus Lee, her betrothed since girlhood, walk across the plain at West Point in his cadet grays and become the man she's waited four years to marry. She has imagined this moment a hundred times: his eyes finding hers in the crowd, the promise of a wedding at last, a future as neatly pressed as her traveling gown.

But something is wrong the moment she arrives.

It's in the way conversations stop when she enters a room. The way John's fellow cadets look at her with something too close to pity. The way older women murmur behind their fans and won't quite meet her eye. Genevieve tells herself it's nothing - nerves, homesickness, the strangeness of Virginia after Louisiana. John is attentive. John is charming. John says all the right things.

And yet.

There is a name mentioned once and never again. A laugh that dies too quickly when she walks by. A look that passes between two officers that she isn't meant to catch. Whatever it is, it seems the whole of Virginia already knows it - knows him - in a way she does not. As graduation gives way to celebration, and celebration to whispers she can no longer ignore, Genevieve must decide how much she's willing to see, and what she'll do when she finally can't look away from the truth everyone around her has known all along.