Plot Summary

On a snowy mid-December night in Covington, Maine, a young woman from out-of-town is brought into the hospital unconscious after being pulled from the icy river after an accident on the bridge. She is physically all right, with only a mild concussion and minor scrapes and bruises, but she awakens with a case of retrograde amnesia, which is problematic because nobody in town knows who she is and any identification she had was lost, probably somewhere in the river. As Sheriff Crowley investigates, he only knows that she ate at Masie's Diner that evening and waitress Eleanor pointed her in the direction of the hotel as a place to stay for the night. Believing it important in case she came back for it, Eleanor also kept an advertisement the woman inadvertently left at the diner for a tree-lighting ceremony on Christmas Eve in Charleston, South Carolina, with the note "Please come--Mark" written on the back. After a week with no further idea who she is, "Jane", as she is now called, decides to check herself out of the hospital against the advice of Sheriff Crowley and Doctor Grant, her attending physician, believing that the answers to her life await her in the form of "Mark" at that tree-lighting in Charleston on Christmas Eve. Paul Bennett, one of her attending nurses, offers her a ride, as with no ID she has no other way to get there, and Charleston is on the way to his own Christmas destination of Pickering, Georgia. As Jane and Paul make their way to Charleston for Christmas Eve, Jane seems to have a positive effect on everyone they meet, something that Paul can see as he starts to fall for her. What happens between them will be affected by their individual journeys. While Jane's path is more obvious in needing to regain her memory, especially about "Mark," Paul's is just as complicated: an issue with his brother and sister-in-law Ben and Marissa Bennett was the reason he didn't go home for Christmas the year before.—Huggo