What lies just beyond love-devotion, obsession, or something far more dangerous? While teaching at a Canadian university, American expatriate English professor Sean O'Hara uncovers a fragile diary tucked among his family papers. Its author, his great-great-great-grandmother, Bridget Ryan. A scholar of Edgar Allan Poe, Sean is startled to discover that Bridget's life once intersected with the enigmatic writer himself. As he begins to read, academic curiosity gives way to something more intimate, more unsettling: the sense that history, as it has been told, is incomplete. Bridget's story begins in 1825, with a fierce, brilliant sixteen-year-old determined to defy the limits placed on her. Denied entry to medical school because she is a woman, she is forced onto an unexpected path, one that carries her from Boston to the shadowed streets of Baltimore, into a life of quiet rebellion, sacrifice, and dangerous proximity to one of literature's most haunted figures. As her connection to Poe deepens, so too does the possibility that she witnessed-and perhaps influenced-the final, mysterious days of his life. Blending meticulous historical detail with bold reimagination, author Patricia J. Parsons crafts a haunting narrative that dares to question what we think we know.
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