Spending the summers on her family's private island off the coast of Massachusetts with her cousins and a special boy named Gat, teenaged Cadence struggles to remember what happened during her fifteenth summer.

Six years have passed since Jake watched the love of his life, Natalie, marry Todd. For six years, he hid a broken heart by focusing on his career as a college professor. But when he sees Todd's obituary in the newspaper, he can't stay away any longer. Finally, he sees Todd's wife--but it's not Natalie. Whoever the widow is, she and Todd have been married for over a decade; and with that fact, he learns that his life is based on fiction, and digging...

"A ghost story set in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, an elegiac consideration of grief, devotion (filial and romantic), and the vanishing and persistence of all things--seen and unseen. A teacher visiting his dying brother in the Bronx. A mysterious journal from the nineteenth century stolen from a boarding house. A therapy clown and an assassin, both presumed dead, but perhaps not dead at all... With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay...

In the aftermath of a fatal car accident, a private journal of love notes written by a husband to his wife passes into the keeping of a hospital patient, and from there through the hands of five other suffering people, touching each of them uniquely.

Offers encouragement and supplies, from a snack and a blanket to a map for finding the way home, to a loved one who may be facing a new challenge.