To Echo and Remain: A Love Story

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Some spend a lifetime looking for love. Others wait a lifetime to be reunited with someone once so deeply loved. To Echo and Remain is a historical romance about a lover’s promise and a lasting bond that even death cannot put asunder.

Set primarily in an old inn in the mountains of North Carolina, To Echo and Remain explores the power of love, forgiveness and second chances. These valuable lessons are revealed as the long-held secrets of Ruth Fischer, the elderly innkeeper, come to light.

Ethan Montgomery, a young attorney living in Atlanta, and Rachel Fischer, his girlfriend, both hindered in their quest for love by the scars of their pasts, struggle to keep their cobbled together relationship from falling apart.

At a time when the tenuous bond they share is most vulnerable, Ethan’s former fiancée Charlotte suddenly reappears and fuels the anger and self-doubt that has driven Ethan since their breakup. When faced with keeping promises to Rachel or proving to all that he is a more capable lawyer than he is given credit for, Ethan comes home to break the news to Rachel that he cannot go with her to visit her grandmother during a long holiday weekend.

The fact that he must face Charlotte as opposing council raises Rachel’s suspicions and Ethan’s mother’s hopes that he will return to his former lover. Ethan is representing the elderly homeowners of a small minority neighborhood barely surviving in the shadows of the growing city of Atlanta. He struggles to save a stand of trees which are threatened by a developer.

Rachel, a woman tough as nails on the outside but lost and fearful within, keeps Ethan at a safe emotional and physical distance. Haunted by the harsh words of her deceased and embittered mother who never recovered from a failed love, Rachel sees herself fulfilling the tradition of her mother and grandmother, fiercely guarding her heart and living according to her own terms, never compromising herself in the name of love.

Traveling alone, Rachel turns to her grandmother, Ruth Fischer, for advice. Ruth surprises Rachel with the secret details about a long ago affair that resulted in the birth to her only child. Rachel begins to set aside her own bitterness and begins to have hope that she too can fall in love and finally be happy.

Ethan eventually makes his way to the inn to save his relationship with Rachel. There he hears Ruth's story about her lover, killed tragically decades earlier, and their roles in founding the Joyce Kilmer National Forest. Ethan and Rachel also learn about Buck, a majestic deer, Ruth’s companion whenever she makes her way to the very spot beneath the trees where Rachel’s mother was conceived.

To Echo and Remain is a southern tale set in an old inn in the Appalachian foothills of western North Carolina. It unfolds against a back story of the grandmother’s role in founding the Joyce Kilmer National Forest, and a few secrets she has kept, one secret so powerful that when it is finally told, Ethan and Rachel’s lives are forever changed.