"Danika Brown knows what she wants: professional success, academic renown, and an occasional roll in the hay to relieve all that career-driven tension. But romance? Been there, done that, burned the T-shirt. Romantic partners, whatever their gender, are a distraction at best and a drain at worst. So Dani asks the universe for the perfect friend-with-benefits - someone who knows the score and knows their way around the bedroom. When big, brooding security...

When she volunteers to take in five-year-old Sharla Cody for the summer, eighty-year-old Addy Shadd forms a powerful bond with Sharla that prompts her to recollect her own childhood in Rusholme, a town settled by fugitive slaves in the mid-1800s.