After years of self-imposed, fearful reclusiveness inside her home, Lucinda Hunter has started moving out into the world. She has found her family and her isolation has ended, largely thanks to Katanya Taylor, who ventured into her garden five years earlier and beckoned to Lucinda to come outside. Now a feisty, somewhat irreverent teenager, Katanya comes with her mother and grandmother to spend weekends with Lucinda - their initial connection stronger than ever.
Everything is going well. Yet Lucinda feels an urgent anxiety, fearful that she will never have sufficient time to spend with her own very elderly grandmother, that she will never be able to absorb all the details of her family history. She is racing against time. Yet she is happier than she's been since childhood. And meeting Eli Carter, her grandmother's doctor, presents an unexpected and challenging set of new circumstances.
Then, on September 11, 2001, the world is cataclysmically changed. In the aftermath, faced with the shattering repercussions that affect everyone and everything Lucinda knows, she is pulled, finally, entirely, into a new reality.
With insightful sensitivity Charlotte Vale Allen explores the hearts and minds of Lucinda, her friends and family as they grapple with the terrible upheaval in their lives as a result of a single day's events.
