When Piper Mills was 12, she helped her grandfather bury a box that belonged to her grandmother in the backyard. For 12 years, it remained untouched. Now a near-fatal accident has shattered Piper's dreams of Olympic glory. After her grandfather's death, she inherits the house and all its secrets, including a key to a room that doesn't exist - or does it? And after her grandmother is sent away to a nursing home, she remembers the box buried in the backyard.

In it are torn pages from a scrapbook, a charm necklace - and a newspaper article from 1929 about the body of an infant found floating in the Savannah River. The necklace's charms tell the story of three friends during the 1920s - each charm added during the three months each friend had the necklace and recorded her life in the scrapbook.

Piper always dismissed her grandmother as not having had a story to tell. And now, too late, Piper finds she might have been wrong.