Paige Austin has interesting work, a stable marriage, and a circle of women friends who help soothe the empty spot she would have filled with the child she can't conceive. Then the stepson she hardly knows, Malachi MacGowan, walks into her life. An impossibly tall, smart-talking young man, he makes her feel certifiably old -- and yet edgily, wonderfully alive. In a few electric days, Mal and Paige seem to forge a connection neither of them can fully fathom. She is no longer childless, and Mal basks in a love unprecedented in his seventeen years. Then, as abruptly as he arrived, he stalks away -- into an existence defined by friends and activities Paige can only imagine. Left with an unraveling marriage and a wounded heart, she attempts her own kind of escape...until Mal's inevitable crisis crashes in.