"I'm no longer afraid of monsters because I once loved one." Emina Gaspar

Elizabeth Waring Janicek faces a serious dilemma, one that might well cost the young woman her life. What can you do when you find yourself trapped in a foreign country you can't leave because your husband won't let you have your passport?

Hidden away in a convent hospital while recovering from a beating so severe she almost died, Elizabeth looks back at her brief marriage to a man she's come to fear. Henry had been so magnificent, so perfect, as he courted her in the small town of Calumet, Michigan, during her last year of high school. They'd honeymooned in Minnesota, eventually settling in Butte, Montana, where Henry began his career as chief negotiator for the Anaconda Copper Company.

The prospect of a prolonged strike by union workers that would have torpedoed his career forced Henry to accept a transfer to the far-off Chuquicamata Mine in Chile. There, his affair with his assistant's Chilean wife is sidelined by his growing concern that his young wife might be caught up in an affair of her own. Elizabeth's disappearance after a violent confrontation between husband and wife leads to a frantic search for Elizabeth now living under an assumed name in Malaga, Spain.

The young woman now has a difficult choice to make. Should she continue to live safely in Spain as the "wife" of the man she's come to love? Or should she return to her family in Michigan and divorce the man she now sees as a monster and risk him coming after her?