• This trade paperback edition will replace the mass market edition,
  ISBN: 978-0-06-109333-3, which is now out of print.

The year is 1961, and Lila Lee Bayliss is thirteen. Her mother died when she was born, and although her widower father assures her it wasn’t her fault, Lila believes it really was. When she learns that her mother’s younger cousin, Nora Findlay, will be arriving in Lytton, Georgia, that summer to mind her, she is not pleased at the prospect of sharing her life and her father with a stranger. But Nora has a certain something about her—she laughs a lot, and she smokes and she seems to have done just about everything fun there is to do in this world. She is unlike any grown-up that Lila has ever known, and she reads a lot—and takes Lila’s dreams of becoming a writer seriously. Pretty soon, Hamilton Bayliss, Lila’s father, who has been on his own and reserved since her mother died, is humming while he shaves. The whole household seems revitalized with Nora’s energy, and when she takes a job teaching at the local high school, it seems that she might stay on in Lytton forever. But something is troubling Nora—something more than the snide comments of some of the neighbors, who don’t take kindly to someone so free-thinking as Nora. Rather, it seems to Lila that something from Nora’s past is troubling her, and as much as Nora has tried to run away from the life she led before coming to stay with Lila and Hamilton, it seems that she cannot keep far enough away from a shocking truth that will stun the residents of this small, segregated town, and forever change the life of young Lila.