What do you want most in the world? What Anne Marie Roche wants is to find happiness again. At thirty-eight, she’s childless, a recent widow. She owns a successful bookstore on Seattle’s Blossom Street, but despite her accomplishments, there’s a feeling of emptiness.
On Valentine’s Day, Anne Marie and several other widows get together to celebrate…a sense of hope. They each begin a list of twenty wishes—including things they’d always wanted to do but never did.
Some of the items on Anne Marie’s list: learning to knit, falling in love again, doing good for someone else. When she volunteers at a local school, an eight-year-old girl named Ellen enters her life. It’s a relationship that becomes far more involving—and far more important—than Anne Marie had ever imagined.