With everyNew York Times bestseller, Luanne Rice illuminates yet another of the secret wonders of the heart. Her unforgettable evocations of family, friendship, and loves lost and won in such novels as The Edge of Winter,Sandcastles, and Summer of Roses give voice to our most powerful emotions. Now she brings back two of her most beloved characters to tell of their journey across the sea to unravel the mysteries of a shared pastand two undying love affairs....

What Matters Most Sister Bernadette Ignatius has returned to Ireland in the company of Tom Kelly to search for the pastand the sonthey left behind. For it was here that these two long-ago lovers spent a season of magic before Bernadette's calling led her to a vocation as Mother Superior at Star of the Sea Academy on the sea-tossed Connecticut shore.

For Tom, Bernadette's choice meant giving up his fortune and taking the job as caretaker at Star of the Sea, where he could be close to the woman he could no longer have but whom he never stopped loving. And while one miracle drew them apart, another is about to bring them together again. For somewhere in Dublin a young man named Seamus Sullivan is also on a search, dreaming of being reunited with his own first love, the only "family" he's ever known. They'd been inseparable growing up together at St. Augustine's Children's Home, until Kathleen Murphy's parents claimed her and she vanished across the sea to America.

Now, in a Newport mansion, that very girl, grown to womanhood, works as a maid and waits with a faith that defies all reason for the miracle that will bring back the only boy she's ever loved. That miracle is at handbut like most miracles, it can come only after the darkest of nights and the deepest of heartbreaks. For life can be as precarious as a walk along a cliff, and its greatest rewards reached only by those who dare to risk everything...for what matters most.