When Lucas speaks for the first time since a childhood accident, he delivers a strange message. Then he disappears.
“Natalie Hoodson, 27, wannabe-writer and John Keats nut, crashed and burned (just like her attempts at romance) on a France-bound plane somewhere over the Atlantic. Upon hearing the tragic news, her baseball superstar ex-boyfriend asked, ‘Why the hell was she going to France?’ and the gentleman who first introduced her to Keats’ seductive poetry merely said, ‘Who?’ and returned to petting his cocker spaniel.”
That’s how Natalie figures her obituary would appear in the Scissors Falls Weekly back home in Virginia. And that would be a highlight of the positives in her life. It wouldn’t mention her bestselling novelist father and his harem of wives. It wouldn’t mention her brain-damaged brother Lucas, who hasn’t spoken since a childhood accident that only Natalie witnessed. It wouldn’t mention her best friend Val, dead now five years in a car crash on the eve of their college graduation.
So in France, Natalie figures, life can only improve.
But it doesn’t. Because in France, she loses Lucas. His disappearance sparks a reunion with everyone she came to France to avoid, but also with the truth about what really happened to Lucas on the playground nineteen years ago.