About the Book
Lucie Santoro has chosen truth over protection.
Now she must build something that can survive what’s coming.
After breaking her engagement and losing her place within the careful architecture of East Harlem respectability, Lucie stands alone — without Carlo’s steady name, without the shield of family certainty, and without the illusion that integrity comes without sacrifice. But solitude doesn’t last. The world won’t let it.
Federal raids sweep through immigrant neighborhoods. Her students begin to disappear — chairs empty overnight, notebooks abandoned, families gone without warning. When Henry Street is shut down and the settlement house becomes a flu ward of cots and coughing bodies, Lucie loses the classroom that gave her purpose. A labor lawyer tells her to keep writing. A union organizer tells her the evidence she’s gathered could save lives — or end hers. An agent named Foley watches from the sidewalk with professional patience and an open notebook.
Lucie refuses to retreat. Instead, she builds.
What begins in tenement kitchens — women sharing soup and information across language barriers — grows into something no one planned. A women’s auxiliary forms, then expands: Italian, Polish, Russian, Jewish, Irish women working side by side to run supply lines, medical cooperatives, rent strikes, and emergency funds. When even the kitchens aren’t safe, the operation moves to a waterfront warehouse secured by a man whose help comes with its own complications. Lucie makes triage lists. She confronts a journalist whose betrayal puts families at risk. She coordinates across union locals and ethnic neighborhoods that have never trusted each other before.
And on Thanksgiving morning, she stands on a makeshift platform at Pier 54, speaking to five thousand dockworkers and their families in the predawn cold — with her brother Joe beside her, federal agents in the crowd, and a Tribune photographer capturing every word for the front page.
The cost is real. Friends are beaten. Allies are deported. The brother who stands with her at the docks may not stand with her at home. And the question she’s been circling since June finally demands an answer — not as philosophy, but as a woman standing on a platform above a harbor, her voice gone raw, choosing who she will be with the whole city watching.
Who do you become when you can no longer return to who you were?
Set in the charged aftermath of World War I and the first Red Scare, The Promise: Book Three is a powerful historical saga about exile, belonging, and the courage to build a new world when the old one no longer holds you.
Where choice becomes legacy.
For readers of Lisa Wingate and Kristin Hannah — historical fiction where women without power build something anyway, where the stakes are deportation and violence, not just heartbreak, and a coalition across ethnic lines becomes the most dangerous act of all.
The 1919 raids, the flu ward, the Pier 54 waterfront organizing — all rooted in history. Explore the real stories behind the fiction → The Cost of Becoming
Why would Lucie leave? Sherilyn Decter on the question that pulled a supporting character out of another series and gave her a trilogy of her own.
Related
