Your life story didn’t begin with you. It reaches back to the beginning of time. You rose from the bodies of your ancestors. You’re the witness to their existence. There is nothing more alive than the sea, nothing more deadly . . . Two childhood friends, Maggie and Elizabeth, are irrevocably joined by their love for one man lost on the Southern Cross, a brother to one and a groom-to-be of the other. Lives of families come into focus against the background of the island of Newfoundland, taking readers on a journey beginning more than a century ago and continuing to the 1970s. The lost vessel becomes a ghostly presence along the rugged shores of Newfoundland during a torturous wait for news, a lingering disruption in people’s lives that brings no relief. A loss comes for which the church offers solace, the graveyard none. Motivated by her family connection to the disappearance of the Southern Cross and its 174 sealers during the March 1914 voyage to the icefields, the author stitches together the lives of women and men cut from strong, enduring fabrics.