It's May's 17th birthday - a date with enormous significance for her immediate family, making the air itself tingle with a tension which May doesn't fully understand. But she knows that her mother and her aunt are being evasive, that there are conversations she's not privy to, that secrets are being kept, lies being told. Like her grandmother before her, May has her own magic: the bees whisper to her as they hover in the flowers in the garden... the ghosts chatter in the graveyard she retreats to.