Legacy

Brigitte Nicholson is thirty-eight, with a job she enjoys, a partner she loves, and a book she keeps promising herself she will finish. Everything in her life is deferred to "someday": someday she will sort out where things stand with Ted, someday she will stop choosing the safe option. Then a snowy day in Boston upends what she had counted on, and she has to work out a new direction.

In the middle of that upheaval, she agrees to help her mother research the family's genealogy. The records are fragmentary and centuries old, but they point to something she never expected: a link to French aristocracy, and to an ancestor named Wachiwi, a young Dakota Sioux woman. Brigitte wants to know how a woman from the Great Plains ended up at the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and how she became part of the family at all.

The novel moves between Brigitte's present and Wachiwi's eighteenth-century journey, setting a modern academic's search against a daring young woman's passage into the unknown. Brigitte follows the trail from South Dakota to Paris, piecing together clues about Wachiwi's life, and discovers that the history she is uncovering is changing how she lives her own. This is a story about courage, inheritance, and the moment when "someday" finally becomes now.