But there I stand, with one hand resting on his shoulder, and I wonder what I was feeling in that moment. Why did I place my hand there? Was it for comfort, for reassurance, or to show that he was mine?

Emma Werner, now an old woman, is domineering, cold and difficult to love. But she has not always been so. What happened to Magdalena Johanna Emma Scholz, the bright young woman she once was? And why does she still take flowers to the grave of her first love?

Emma turns to the journals she has kept for sixty years to rediscover her old self, and to reclaim her future. They reveal the story of a survivor: a woman who suffered but never wavered, whose strength of will and self-belief helped her endure and make a life for herself and her family in a small town in the Riverina.