A Field That Isn't Grass

Isaac Whitfield has been dreaming of the same girl since he was four years old. A field that isn't quite grass. A sky the color of a bruise. A barefoot girl in a yellow raincoat who tells him things no four-year-old should know, and who is there, without fail, every single night for twenty-five years. He's never told anyone the truth: that he built his entire life around a person who doesn't exist. Then it rains hard enough to send him into a bookshop he's never noticed, on a street he doesn't remember, and the woman behind the counter tilts her head like a bird listening for something underground — and Isaac understands, all at once, that he has been wrong about what "exist" means. What follows isn't a love story that survives against the odds. It's one that doesn't. This is a book about what's left standing after the odds win anyway — a husband learning to raise a daughter alone, a woman's unfinished paintings waiting in a locked storage unit, a key nobody can explain, and a marriage that keeps happening in the space between sleep and waking long after it should have ended. Some people spend their whole lives waiting for one person to recognize them. Isaac got twenty-nine years of it. This is the story of what he did with the rest.