“Grandpa Fred always used to say that God would find you where you were. You didn’t have to go to church to be with him. He was in everything. The trees. The rays of the sun. The wind. Luella always thought that was a crock because she didn’t feel him anywhere. Despite that, she believed Grandpa Fred. Because she had watched the way he closed his eyes against the warmth of the sun in the afternoons and smiled—like God had reached out and cupped his cheek. Sometimes she’d close her eyes too, but she never felt it. She wondered if she ever would.”
Seven. That’s how old Luella McCrae was when her mother abandoned her, leaving her in the driveway of her grandparents’ foster home. There, she grew up among the other foster children, resenting every day that her mother never came back for her. She left the farm the day she turned eighteen—her sights set on a life in the city.
Eleven years later, she’s still struggling to make a name for herself as a writer in Atlanta. After losing her job and getting kicked out of her apartment, she receives a phone call from her grandma’s lawyer with an offer that’s hard to refuse. Her grandma is sick, in need of a caregiver and help around the farm. Luella swore she’d never go back to Chipley Creek. But with no job, and no place to live, it seems like the only option she has.
If she accepts, it means returning to the home she said she never would, the grandma she resents, and the love she left behind.