The Barton Family Series

In this fifth book of the epic Barton Family Series, Hattie Barton finally marries her first love, Will Kendrick, and is set to travel with him to Shanghai where he’d served as a missionary after their broken engagement thirty years earlier. A family crisis interrupts their plans and Will is forced to go alone to Shanghai. He is detained when the US enters World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

Hattie Barton’s life changes forever on October 24, 1929, the historic day of the New York stock market crash. She is suddenly forced to leave her palatial home in Calhoun, relocate to an apartment in her hometown in Greenville, and find work to support herself, her two young daughters Pauline and Alice, and her trusted housekeeper, Georgia. When she takes a job as secretary in a small insurance firm, a potential romance develops between Hattie and her boss, Seth Snoddy However, an unexpected turn causes her to reevaluate whether she can ever settle for a marriage of convenience.

In this sequel to Hattie’s Place, the year is 1913. Hattie Robinson is married to the widowed Charles Barton and has left her teaching position at Calhoun School to raise Charles’s sons and manage the Barton estate. Now she must reconcile her role as mother and wife with her work for woman’s suffrage, a cause that ignited her passion when attending the Woman’s Suffrage Procession in Washington, on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s first inauguration

A letter from Will Kendrick breaks Hattie Robinson’s heart one week before her 1907 graduation from Greenville Female College. He’s ended their engagement, making mysterious references to events preventing him from committing to their relationship. Alone and confused by Will’s cryptic letter, Hattie takes a position as an elementary school teacher in Calhoun, South Carolina, and tries to put her life back together. She moves in with prominent attorney Charles Barton, his wife Elizabeth, and their four sons.