Lydia Wyse is drawn back to her childhood Amish community through her mother's "promise box," and seeks to leave behind her secular life as a book editor when she meets bachelor Gideon Hooley.

Julia Cavanaugh leaves New York for the first time in 1889 to accompany a group of orphans to their new families in thewest, but her plans to return directly home are put on hold when she learns that she has been sold in marriage to an uncouth miner in Montana, and she must turn to a respected circuit preacher for help.

"On the night Marianna Sommers was born, a freak accident shattered her family. Even as she came into the world, her two sisters left it for heaven. She's spent her life making up for that loss, being to her family and their Indiana Amish community all that her sisters would have been. Her only dream: a simple life married to Aaron Zook, the one she's loved since childhood. Then her father says they are moving--to Montana, of all places! Of course...