Author's Note

Bike rides, traipsing through old half-forgotten gardens and seeing her first shooting star- those are some of the things Rae had never experienced in Manila.

Nothing seems to have worked out well so far in her short, young life. Having had her fair share of sorrow and poverty, she thought she knew everything in life already. Thus the sullen teenager wasn't quite prepared to know Atlas or experience her very first love in quiet, rustic La Estrella.

But La Estrella grows not only flowers in its dark earth, it also buries secrets that people have taken to their grave.

Will the truth set her free or will the universe always conspire against her?