Dana Ullman buries her husband on the morning of September 11, only miles from the site of the Pennsylvania plane crash. After months of putting her life on hold, she finally decides to head south, to try to pick up the lost strands of her youth. Finding that her grandmother’s house is now gone, replaced by a shopping mall, she phones an old acquaintance from her school days. Cassius Huston is black, separated from his jealous wife, and devoted to his three-year-old daughter. Much to their surprise, Cassius and Dana fall deeply in love. But when Dana is threatened by Cassius’s family, she heads to the coast, to the fishing village of Pelican Bay, to wait for him.
She is soon drawn intimately into the life of the small town, a town with an invisible dividing line between black and white. Dana lives in the middle of that line. In the course of the tale, Dana will be obsessed by love, pulled into the local family meltdowns and public secrets, and will provide sanctuary to several unforgettable characters.
