Summary

While she rests, Denise dreams of Tommy sitting on the edge of her bed. The past haunts the novel’s characters most painfully while they sleep. She awakens from her dream, to find herself in a nightmare—a nightmare far too similar to the nightmare she was forced to live seven years earlier—as she hears police officers downstairs asking about the details of a missing child.

Pulled back into her memories, Denise recalls visiting a church in Oklahoma with her grandfather when she was child. She remembers when the minister asked people to step forward and receive healing from the Lord. Many congregation members limped and hobbled forward, offering their pain up to God: “All she remembered was being shocked that the world had so much pain in it, and the unfairness that one family should take on so...