The Grace Hotel has stood in Charleston since 1891: one hundred and thirty-seven rooms, ninety-seven employees, one owner. Vivian Chase runs it with a ledger in one hand and her family's name in the other. Her daughter Yvonne, thirty-one, brilliant and silent, has spent five years proposing to reopen the sealed east wing. Five years of being told: next year. Then Jonah Marsh checks in: thirty years old, six years of writing code in San Francisco, three years of rendering other people's buildings beautifully, and then, one night, a bus ticket south. He sold his shares to come and read the half of an 1891 designer's manuscript that was never published, and to find out whether he still remembered how to build one house that was right. Here he has no standing. He is a tenant. Under the rules of the house, he should not even look at her twice. But when her fingers brush a tuberose on the vine and the stem lets go, he catches it before it reaches the ground. And when a developer named Silas Sutton cuts the power, freezes the loans and lays siege to the hotel, demanding the building and the daughter, Marsh is the only outsider who refuses to leave. What follows is a war fought with contracts and tuberoses: a promise made in a dead man's name, a toast that turns a savior into a "brother," love letters passed like contraband, a night receptionist named Scarlett who fights back with nothing but the truth, and a farewell at the train station that neither of them believes is final. And the respectable marriage that old-Charleston heir Henry Trask brings to the table will turn a promise the Chases made in public into a weapon aimed at their own heart.