A children’s book illustrator and novelist moves into the old fixer farmhouse she and her husband fell in love with just before his death. Maggie, too young to be a widow, hires a local handyman, and he and his family become her first friends in town. For her it’s all the usual transitional experience—a little personal inventory, trying to fill in empty spaces, occupying her time with banal tasks. And waiting for the right time to break a long-held secret to her son when he comes home from college. Summer unfolds and a series of unusual events pulls Maggie out of her limbo. She starts to think her friends’ foster-daughter’s violent origin is a connection, and works to discover whether the child is somehow the culprit, or if she’s just as endangered as those who suffer around her.
