On her favorite day of the year, Elizabeth Davenport awakens in her cottage on the wild and windy Cornish coast, opens her front door, and discovers a precious gift: the small blue crocus and a note that begins I Wish ... They are not signed, but she knows they've been left by her first and truest love, Tom Hale. Each of these precious missives convey a simple wish for something they had missed, and the life they might have shared. She has kept them all. But on this day, what should have been the fiftieth anniversary of their falling in love, the gift fails to arrive.