On what it means to have a refuge in the world. Everything seems to be collapsing around Willa Knox: As a freelance journalist, she's without assignments. Her husband, Iano, loses his professorship, her son, Zeke, has just become a father—but a single parent. And her seriously ill father-in-law raves about the "megaphone," the Republican presidential candidate. In the same spot, 150 years earlier, a teacher named Thatcher befriends his reclusive neighbor. The naturalist Mary Treat is in lively correspondence with Charles Darwin, but in the close-knit local community, the theory of evolution is denounced as sin. What connects these people across the centuries?