Ronan at nineteen has lived by himself for ten years, ever since the night his mother disappeared. He has taken up her trade as a tailor and included the Irish/Druid blessings in the clothing he stitches. But his life is afflicted with isolation--he and his mother were outsiders never accepted in the community--and he has no friends in the small Louisiana bayou town of Bridewater Bay. Without friends or parents his new feelings of attraction to a charismatic young man who works at the docks confuse and distress him. When he is visited by the ghost of the Bride for whom Bridewater Bay is named, he assumes she comes because of his shameful feelings for Abel.

This gripping story of a lonely young man's coming of age in a southern town in the late nineteenth century is moving, romantic, and scary. Readers experience the two young men making their way down a road that is totally unfamiliar to them and facing grave danger. A terrifying and beautiful love story.