When I See Through You cover

WWII Historical Romance · Fated Bond · Slow Burn

When I See Through You

A Novel

Two boys courted Rose Vale that last golden summer before the war. When they marched off to fight, she sent one of them away wearing her grandmother's jade pendant — a keepsake older and stranger than anyone can quite explain. She meant it as a promise. She had no idea what she had set in motion.

a novel by Mira Lavelle

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The Story

A love that has to cross a war to come home

Everyone in Coweta County thinks they know Rose Vale: the dazzling belle with a ready laugh and a kind word for everyone. No one suspects the watchful, exacting girl she keeps hidden beneath the performance — the real Rose, the one almost no one is ever allowed to meet.

Two boys court her that last golden summer before the war. When they march off to fight, Rose gives one of them the most precious thing she owns: her grandmother's jade pendant, an old and curious heirloom her family swore should never be parted. Wear it home to me, she tells him. Bring it back.

But the pendant is older and stranger than anyone in her family remembers — and the stone at Rose's throat carries a history far larger than one girl's heart. It is about to ask her to believe the impossible, and to cross a war that no one will let a grieving girl cross.

A sweeping, slow-burning story about being truly seen — and about how far the heart will travel to find its way home.

The Cast

A girl, two suitors, and a stone with a memory

☀

Rose Vale

The Performer

A Georgia belle whose dazzling "bright voice" hides a watchful, forensic mind. Her whole journey is learning when to set the mask down — and, when the war demands it, how to wear it like armor.

☽

The Two Shadows

Jack Mercer & Ray Dalton

Two young men orbit Rose that last golden summer — one gold and gregarious, certain the world will arrange itself around him; the other quiet and watchful, noticing what everyone else misses. The county calls them the two shadows. The war will ask everything of all three.

♢

The Jade Pendant

An Heirloom

Older and stranger than Rose's family can explain, carried into the war as a promise. It remembers more than anyone alive — and, Rose will learn, it does not intend to stay quiet.

Themes

To be seen is the only magic worth keeping

Being Seen

The deepest intimacy in this book is attention. To be truly seen — beneath the performance, across an ocean, through a war — is the love that outlasts everything.

Love vs. Possession

There is a difference between loving someone and wanting to own them. That quiet line runs beneath every choice these characters make.

What We Inherit

Some things are handed down heavier than they look — a grandmother's heirloom, a family's silences, a longing older than anyone living.

The Bright Voice

A mask can be a cage or a tool. Rose's whole arc is learning the difference — and what a woman does with the performance that kept her safe and kept her hidden.

For readers of The Nightingale (Kristin Hannah), The Winter Sea (Susanna Kearsley), Outlander (Diana Gabaldon), and the love-magic of Alice Hoffman.

The Geography

Farther from home than she ever dreamed

Rose's war carries her far beyond Coweta County — across oceans and borders she never thought she would see, toward a cold green river in the Caucasus called the Karsai. This is the road she travels to keep a promise.

Journey map for When I See Through You — Rose's path across the war

Read the Opening

Chapter One

When I See Through You

The Two Shadows

There was a war on the far side of the world that summer, but it had not yet learned the road to Coweta County, and so on the Fourth of July in the year 1941 the whole county put on its second-best and came down to the church grove by the river to eat too much, court too openly, and pretend with its entire heart that the radio had been making the foreign parts up.

Rose Ashford Vale was sixteen years old and at the very top of her powers.

She knew it, too, which was half of what made it true. She moved through the grove the way a good swimmer moves through familiar water — easily, and faster than she appeared to, and with a perfect private knowledge of where the cold currents ran.

Two of the county's loops, that summer, bent toward Rose. Everybody had noticed. They had even, in the manner of counties, given the thing a name. The two shadows, they called the Mercer boy and the Dalton boy, because wherever Rose Vale's yellow dress went that summer, two young men went after it in their two different ways — the one out in front of her like sunshine, the other a step behind and to the side, quiet, where you did not see him until you turned your head.

⁂

When the big green firework went up — the best of the poor dozen, a great soft chrysanthemum of green fire that hung over the river — Rose did not watch the green fire. She turned her head, and found Jack Mercer at the dark edge of the quilts, lit green as a thing at the bottom of clear water, and found that he was not watching the fire either.

He was watching her. And he did not look away when she caught him.

End of sample · The Two Shadows, Chapter One of thirty-nine

Why You'll Love This Book

A sweeping romance about attention, courage, and coming home

Reader Promise

A slow-burn historical romance with a touch of the uncanny, built around one question: what does it mean to be truly seen?

Start Reading

Read Chapter One for Rose Vale at the height of her bright performance, before war and an impossible promise change everything.

Every road leads back to her.

Thirty-nine chapters. One jade heirloom, one impossible promise, and a love that crosses an ocean and a war to come home.

Buy from Boom Publishing Books Read Chapter One More Mira Lavelle

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