My favorite line: "a person often meets his destiny on the road he took avoiding it."

This was such a heart-wrenching story about finding love, losing love and following your heart's desires. It surrounds two women with much more in common than the surface shows.

Evelyn is an aged woman who met the "love of her life" at a wedding of a friend. A chance encounter left such an impression on her soul that the image stays with her through her adult life. Years after the encounter, and with her current husband, she catches a glimpse of him again and a flood of emotions and feelings envelope her heart. Are her feelings a reflection of what she gave up or hopes of what she might have had?

Alice is in her mid-thirties and has had several relationships. A man in a bar capturers her attention and boldly asks her for a date. A relationship begins, a life of wanting ends and a marriage is on the horizon. Alice awakens one morning while on her honeymoon to a note from her husband stating that he is sorry but he can't take this anymore. Like a thief in the night, he is gone and she is left to deal with the aftermath of not knowing why or where.

Two women -- two lost loves but more than four hearts get broken. Told from two perspectives and two time tables, the stories mesh and blend the pain that only a broken heart can endure. This author has a great talent for placing you front and center in the lives of her characters. The use of art and visual effects from paintings made me have to stop and call up the respective paintings to see if I could see and feel what they were feeling.

The raw, human emotion portrayed on the pages of this book only emphasize that all the people, circumstances, loves and relationships we encounter in our lifetime are like a single drop of blood in our veins -- by itself nothing more than a grain of sand, but added together, it defines who we are.