- Dec 1 - Dec 31
- 2,468 entries
- US only
Abbie Hardin never fully banished the shadows of her sexual assault nineteen years ago by her friend and neighbor Drew Legrange. But when Drew moves back to take over his family’s orchard after his dad’s heart attack, Abbie is forced to examine the emotional barriers she has constructed to protect herself and the distance they put between her and her son Evan, who she conceived from that assault. Evan discovers he is curious about the father he never knew and was raised to hate. When Abbie hires Buddy, a soft-spoken drifter who keeps his past to himself, to work on her farm, the paintings he creates of her and their unexpected intimacy open her eyes to the woman that detachment and torment have made her. Attracted to a vagabond without an identity, afraid her son may follow in his father’s awful footsteps, and living across the creek from the man who assaulted her, Abbie realizes that the person she became to survive no longer suffices when her past becomes her present again.
- Fiction
- Literary fiction