The Heart's True Healer

Joseph Davis comes home from the war with a woman beside him, a physician, and tells the household he means to take her as his concubine. His wife, Grace Clark, married into the Davis house as an ordinary woman, and Joseph does not know that she is the head of Medicine King Valley and a skilled healer. She hid it on purpose. Her elder brother's last wish was for her to make this marriage, and she had agreed to it and set out to be a good wife and mother and to live quietly. The Regent, William Hunter, has loved Grace for years without telling her. She had once saved him, more or less by accident. He cannot stand to watch her treated the way Joseph is treating her, so he hides his rank and starts making trouble for Joseph and the physician, humiliating the pair of them more than once on Grace's behalf. His methods are underhand enough that Grace misreads what he is doing and takes it the wrong way. Grace decides to leave the Davis house and go her own way. She takes up the question of how her brother actually died, and William stays near her while she does it.