by Charlotte Vale Allen

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. Daily, she babysits seven-year-old Jason and takes great pleasure in the boy's whimsical, thoughtful nature. The little girl, Katanya Taylor, who ventured into her garden five years earlier and beckoned to Lucinda to come outside, is now a feisty, somewhat irreverant teenager who comes with her mother and grandmother to spend weekends with LucindaÑtheir 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 very elderly grandmother; that she will never be able to absorb all the details of the 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 11th 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. Nothing will ever be the same.

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.