From the bestselling author of Under a Gilded Moon comes the soaring story of an unlikely friendship of three men and one extraordinary woman and the legacy they built—if their own secrets don’t destroy it.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Joy Jordan-Lake’s Echoes of Us, which is out October 8th 2024.
In the midst of World War II, a Tennessee farm boy, a Jewish Cambridge student, and a German POW forge a connection that endures—against all odds.
But now everything that Will Dobbins, Dov Silverberg, and Hans Hessler fought for is at risk as their descendants clash for control of the corporation they founded together. In an attempt to remake its tattered corporate image, the firm hires event planner Hadley Jacks and her sister Kitzie to organize a reunion for the families on St. Simons Island, Georgia, the place that changed all three men’s lives forever.
As Hadley and her sister delve into the friends’ past, they uncover the life of the courageous young woman who links them all together…and the old wounds that could tear everything apart.
Told in dual timelines spanning World War II and the present, Echoes of Us follows the ripple effects of war, the bonds that outlast it, and the hope that ultimately carries us forward.
Chapter 1
Hans Hessler
APRIL 7, 1942
OFF THE COAST OF ST. SIMONS ISLAND, GEORGIA
At twilight, the U-boat rises to just below the surface, its periscope spearing up through the waves. Its view of the shore is good. Startling, even. A splay of lights from what might be a grand hotel blink cheerily back at the chief engineer.
“Mein Gott,” he mutters.
The hotel’s glow, golden and shimmering on the water, strikes him as what the Americans must be like themselves: bright and shiny and confident, still fresh to this war. Cocky, even, in all their New World, never-tested assumptions. They must be so different from him and this crew, who are bearded now, with boils and blemishes erupting over their boyish faces. They scrabble like rats for decent food. They stink, too, from long weeks without baths.
How untouched by deprivation these Americans still are, how not yet warped by horror. He feels resentment rise like bile in his throat, burning and sour.
Verdammt, Hans thinks, though even a full ocean away from his mother, he does not curse aloud. Why do they have to be such easy prey, these Americans?
Peering into the periscope should be the commander’s job—and even now he rests one hand on the ocular box like he’s laying claim to his territory. As the chief engineer, Hans has been invited—commanded, actually—to look, which could mean the commander is wary. Maybe beneath all his glinting medals, he’s reliving his mistake with the Portuguese tanker, a neutral ship he mistook for an Allied vessel and torpedoed to shards.
“You see . . . what, precisely?” the commander demands from behind.
His voice has gone husky. Dehydration, no doubt—they never have enough drinking water inside this cigarette lighter of a ship. But maybe fear too.
“Can the Americans,” Hans wonders aloud, “really be this stupid? The lights on the shore, they’re blazing.”
His voice, too, is hoarse. He’s been trapped in this straitjacket of steel himself for weeks now—he does not let himself count how many.
But the commander makes no response. Hans’s speech is snarled over with a rough rural Bavarian accent from the south of his country, one that a sophisticated German from the north very well might not understand—or acknowledge if he did. Either way, the commander merely clenches his jaw, his hands clasped behind his back.
Hans takes one last look at the stretch of water and the glowing island beyond.
These ridiculous people, he thinks, drinking their port, surrounded by palms. Do they not know that in New York City, also blazing with light, this very sub only a few weeks ago hunted prey? Like now, it was the light that allowed the kill. These too-happy, too-shiny people can’t possibly know just how close Death is stalking.
Their ignorance—their innocence too—is about to be shattered. Snuffed out. Ruined. As war does. As war has already done to Hans.
He is homesick. He is frightened. Above all, he must never appear to be either of these.
Closing his eyes, he pictures the farm back home in Bavaria: its green shutters sturdy, its window boxes brimming with red geraniums, the spruces and fir towering above its steeply pitched roof. For a moment, he forgets the commander standing at his elbow and Death coiled around the ocular box, waiting.
Now he forces his eyes open again, presses his forehead to the cold steel.
Before he can stop himself, before he can pretend nothing new is passing the scope, Hans gasps.
Chapter 2
Hadley Jacks
APRIL 7, 2022
OFF THE COAST OF ST. SIMONS ISLAND
The word tragedy—I’m sure that’s what he just said—spins me around at the rail of the yacht, and I suck in my breath. The wind whips my hair into my face. “Here, did you say? How long ago?”
Nothing about this place feels tragic—the ocean swelling and sparkling around us at twilight, the island off to our port with its palms and live oaks, its pastel cottages hemming a golden beach, a line of red tiled roofs and blue beach umbrellas suggesting a posh resort.
The captain’s face is fixed ahead, his jaw and shoulders squared, rigid even. As if speaking isn’t technically allowed in his role.
Patience has never been one of my virtues, but I manage to wait, focusing on the yacht’s bow two stories below where we stand on the flybridge. The Atlantic defers to us, parting in shimmering blue fans on each side.
This, I think, must be what it’s like to have power and influence—and apparently, money to burn.
As if reading my thoughts, the captain swings his head back toward our host, who sits a few yards away—his back almost preternaturally straight, his gray suit impeccably tailored and pressed—above a teak deck no doubt custom crafted for lolling about. I’ve worked for his type before: the sort of man who’s become his own monument to wealth, so much of too much that it’s turned him to stone.
Though his face shows no expression, he’s listening to my sister, who is laughing and lifting her glass of chardonnay. Because Kitzie could find kinship and connection with an eel.
“Eighty years ago today exactly. That is, from tonight.”
The voice jolts me back to attention, though it takes me an instant to realize it’s the captain answering my question.
“And yeah. Right here,” he adds. But that’s all, as if he’s now used up his daily quota of words.
With his eyes covered by Ray-Bans, his jaw rigid, his feet planted, with tanned forearms and hands unmoving on the ship’s wheel, I’d swear he wasn’t real—just some heavily themed restaurant’s mannequin of a sea captain—if some of the sun-bleached hair poking out from under his cap didn’t lift just a bit in the breeze or the muscles under his polo didn’t tense. Now and then, too, his jaw, scruffy with blond stubble, shifts side to side. He’s younger than I first thought.
“What sort of tragedy?” I ask, glancing back toward the yacht’s owner.
