The Calling

The CallingIn 1945 San Francisco,Virginia Belle, a devoted Cadet Nurse at the Marine Hospital, is drawn to Claude, a decorated bombardier whose mind remains trapped in the trauma of wartime and an abusive childhood. As the world begins to celebrate peace, Virginia quietly fights her own battle to find her purpose and calling while saving the man she’s come to love from slipping away into madness. Against the backdrop of post-war San Francisco now teetering between peace and the war machine now finding its way back from hostile shores, she risks her heart to bring him back from the edge.The reader finds Virginia medias res boarding the westbound Sunset Limited, whose terminus is San Francisco. Her mother was a victim of the Spanish Flu when Virginia was only two years of age, her father, a respected English Brewer, succumbed to German lagers and alcohol, and the love of her life, Winston, was taken from the world on an island in the South Pacific. Virginia set out to rebuild what the war and the world had taken from her life.Her mother speaks to her from the past through the diary purposely left for Virginia. Knowing the power of story, a gift bestowed upon her by her former tutor, Stella. Virginia uses words to create the escapism she longs for. Through keen observation of her surroundings, Virginia uses poetry and prose to make, at least mentally, a world of beauty, texture, and heroes.Virginia, a woman of charity and purity, expected to maintain the ladylike attributes of the early 20th century while struggling with the realities of the war, the fractures in every life, the longing for comfort, and the need to heed her calling.Decades later, Thomas Watts, a married man living a lonely life, discovers a faded photograph in a dusty antique store: a young woman, a soldier in uniform, her eyes down, his face smug. From the moment he sees her, his world shifts. He hears things. Feels things. It isn’t nostalgia. It’s a calling. He is plagued by dreams, whispers, and a growing conviction: the woman—Virginia—is reaching out from across time. Driven by forces he doesn’t understand, Thomas sets out to uncover her story, and that somehow, impossibly, he is meant to change it.A love story split by time and stitched by fate, The Calling is a haunting meditation on memory, trauma, and the thin veil between past and present, where one woman fights to save a broken soul, and one man answers a voice from the past calling for salvation.The Calling explores the enduring echoes of love, the hidden cost of war, and the mysterious ties that connect two souls across generations. Read more