Twelve-year-old Iris wakes in an unfamiliar bedroom after an ordeal at the beach. The boy who abducted her is barely old enough to drive a car. Twenty-one-year-old Marguerite is newly arrived from France and takes a job tutoring French for pocket money. Her only pupil is a twelve-year-old girl called Lucy, whose mother claims she sometimes tells outlandish lies. Iris and Marguerite’s stories intersect with Philip Klein, the enigmatic TA in the Languages department at the university. He’s everything a girl could want in a tragic hero. He’s intelligent, attractive, sensitive, and swayable. It doesn’t take long for Marguerite to realize he’s perfect for her American life. Her plan is simple: Find the hero of Iris’s tragedy, and make it true. As Iris struggles to remember everything she can about her captor, Marguerite is pulled into her pupil’s fabrications, realizing Lucy knows far more about Philip than she should. Once Lucy starts showing up on campus, leaving secret messages in the library books for someone, Marguerite seeks to uncover the truth. Because her plan is at stake if Philip is Lucy’s target, too. What Marguerite doesn’t realize is that the girl isn’t as dangerous as the ghost stalking her. A buried past never remains interred for long, and Marguerite fears Philip will unearth hers.