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House and rub my eyes and wonder if it is not all a dream.
    —GROVER CLEVELAND, THE 22ND PRESIDENT OF
THE UNITED STATES
    N OT knowing who or
what
to expect to find at the gate or what Francesca was thinking, I emerged from the White House basement and onto a paved sunken courtyard adjacent to the North Portico. Although it was close to six o’clock that June evening, the oppressive heat wave made the warm summer air feel like an old damp dishrag. Even the breeze felt hot and wet.
    I crossed the courtyard and climbed a concrete stairway to the curving driveway that bisected the North Lawn.
    Not for the first time, I felt a surge of pride as I turned a full circle and took in the sight of the White House’s soaring columns. Every inch of the People’s House held a piece of every important man and woman who’d walked these grounds. Stone garlands of oak leaves, acorns, roses, and acanthus leaves had been expertly carved into the White House’s entranceway by stonemasons under the direction of President Thomas Jefferson. President Harry Truman had planted the boxwoods that lined the driveway.
    These were the types of things I hoped to not only protect but highlight as assistant gardener.
    Even though I served at the pleasure of the First Lady and President, I considered the entire nation my client. Not everyone who visited Washington, D.C., would have the opportunity to tour the inside of the White House. Those who did would only see a small portion of the rooms. But the grounds were on display for everyone to enjoy.
    As I took the same path many presidents had walked, I couldn’t help but think that I must have been born under a lucky star.
    I’d come from chaotic beginnings, traveling like a gypsy with my parents from city to city, country to country, often changing our names as we’d flee in the night. Whether my parents were criminals or con men, to this day I still don’t know. My father had abandoned my mother and me shortly after my sixth birthday. The next day, a man with a stubbly beard had murdered my mother while I’d watched. When she died, she took her secrets with her.
    It wasn’t something I liked to think about, but the memories refused to leave me alone lately. They buzzed my consciousness like a swarm of annoying gnats.
    Because I’d lived with a string of false identities for as long as I could remember, it took some time for my grandmother Faye to rescue me from a foster system that didn’t understand how to heal a child as broken and angry as I’d become.
    Treating me as cautiously as one would a wounded animal, Grandmother Faye spoke very little and demanded even less as she carried her tense, bitter grandchild back to Rosebrook, the centuries-old Calhoun family home located in the heart of historic Charleston, South Carolina.
    The four-story mansion was filled with long shadows perfect for hiding. The house became my sanctuary, my place to curl up and lick my wounds. I often hid up in the attic, where the past could be stored and forgotten. I lived in my own world, cut off from my grandmother and two aunts who desperately wanted to love me.
    Then one day as I gazed out an attic window, I fell under the spell of the enchanted walled garden that enveloped Rosebrook.
    Hugging my legs to my chest, I’d watch from that high window with fascination as my grandmother and my spinster aunts, Alba and Willow, worked, often on their hands and knees, tending the flowers, planting vegetable gardens, pruning back ancient hedges with fat, tree-sized trunks. The skirts of their knee-length flowered dresses swished like waves on a beach as the women moved from plant to plant. Their hands were always moving in a smooth rhythm that seemed to calm the fury and fear raging inside me.
    No matter the season or the weather, the three women worked in their garden with a consistency that had been foreign to me, a faithfulness I’d never realized existed and yet had yearned to find.
    One dreary winter morning I