Clara Vance had it all.

Millions of followers, a beauty empire built on glamour, and a life curated for the camera. But a lost bet with her mother sends her away from a marvelous weekend trip to Mykonos and into the dusty attic of her family’s decaying ancestral manor. 

The catch was her inheritance. Her task? A dreary clear-out. Her discovery? A centuries-old diary belonging to her great-grandmother, Eleanor Thorne.

The ink tells a story of a forgotten history. Eleanor’s forbidden obsession with her guardian and step-uncle, Casimir Guggenheim, a ruthless railroad tycoon with a heart of stone.

But when Clara touches the tear-stained pages, the scent of crushed gardenias doesn’t just fill the room, it drags her back to 1879.

Trapped in Eleanor’s corseted body, Clara finds herself under the roof of the very man who haunted the diary. To the world, Casimir is a cold, untouchable magnate. To Clara, he’s a puzzle she’s determined to break.

The problem? Clara isn’t the timid, fragile girl Casimir remembers. She’s a 21st-century It Girl with no filter, a strategic mind for business, a total lack of respect for Gilded Age propriety and a defiance waiting for trouble to happen. While the original Eleanor was a victim of her station, Clara is ready to burn the cage down.

As Clara navigates a world where a single misstep means ruin, scheming relatives see her as a pawn, and a powerful suitor sees her as nothing but a business merger. She realizes the history books were wrong. 

Rewriting Eleanor’s tragic end is dangerous, especially when she starts falling for the man she was never supposed to have.
History says they’re a tragedy. Clara says history is about to get a makeover.

Not really. I drifted in and out of something that couldn't be called rest, replaying the stables on a loop.


The word I'd thrown at his feet like a grenade.


But meaning it didn't stop my chest from aching.


By the time Hattie arrived to dress me, I looked like I'd been through a war. She took one look at my face and wisely said nothing.


The Charity Bazaar was a study in controlled chaos. Silk and candlelight, laughter and gossip, the endless choreography of people who'd rather die than show a single genuine emotion. Normally I'd be performing right along with them, mask in place, game face on.


Aunt Cornelia had swept ahead the moment we arrived, abandoning me to the crowd like a shark releasing a chum ball. I drifted through the rooms, accepting champagne I didn't drink, smiling at faces I didn't see, looking for an escape route that didn't exist.


Chapter 26 - Chapter Twenty-Six: Whitfield’s Puzzle