The Keeper of Happy Endings

Rory Grant, a Boston gallery owner still working through her own broken engagement, leases studio space in a building that once housed the salon of Soline Roussel — a Parisian dressmaker whose gowns were said to guarantee the bride a lifetime of happiness. Renovating the space, Rory discovers a boxed, never-worn wedding dress and a bundle of letters that were never sent, and starts trying to piece together who Soline was and why the dress was left behind.

The novel alternates between Rory's 1980s present and Soline's earlier life as a bridal designer in Nazi-occupied Paris, where the war upends her business, her family, and the promise her dresses were meant to embody. Davis draws a slow-building parallel between the two women's romantic disappointments across the decades, letting the historical mystery of Soline's abandoned dress drive both storylines toward each other.

The Keeper of Happy Endings is dual-timeline historical women's fiction blending a WWII-era Paris narrative with a present-day mystery plot.