In this intimate rendering of a relationship, we learn how deceptive surface impressions can be.

Leon Hale, the author of BONNEY'S PLACE, was 60 years old, a “country boy” who wrote about rural Texans with humor and sensitivity in his popular column for The Houston Post and, later, the Houston Chronicle. Babette Fraser at 36 was a child of privilege, a city girl educated abroad, struggling in her career while raising a young son. No one thought it could work.

Even Hale himself held serious doubts. But it did endure. The interior congruencies they discovered through a long and turbulent courtship knit them tightly together for the rest of his life.

And when he died during the pandemic isolation period, searing levels of grief and doubt threatened Babette’s understanding of the partnership and marriage that had sustained her for 40 years. Had he really been the person she thought he was? Had he kept secrets that would forever change her view of him?

In candid, evocative prose, Babette explores the distorted perceptions that often follow the death of a cherished spouse and the loving resolution that allows life to go on.