Unexpected encounters confine and define the lives of strangers, while parents and partners navigate blended families and modern love. An older woman tells her waitress that she once left a newborn on church steps. A motel housekeeper makes a radical proposal to a guest. A teenager grapples with atheism and grief and eBay. A mother’s world is disrupted and recharged after a neighborhood man gives her young daughter a telescope. Strange, heartfelt, sly and wryly funny, Sarah Braunstein’s stories ask us to confront the ways we try to make sense of our lives --- and what happens when we escape from these preconceptions.

Now that her brilliant botanist daughter is off at college, Maeve Cosgrove loves her job at a quiet Maine public library more than anything. But when a teenager accuses Maeve of spying on her romantic escapades in the mezzanine bathroom, she winds up laid off and humiliated. Stuck at home in a tailspin, Maeve cares for the mysterious plants in her daughter’s greenhouse while obsessing over the clearly troubled girl at the source of the rumor. She hopes to have a powerful ally in her attempts to clear her name: her favorite author, Harrison Riddles, who has finally responded to her adoring letters and accepted an invitation to speak at the library. Riddles, meanwhile, announces a plan to write a novel about another young library patron, Sudanese refugee Willie, and enlists Maeve’s help in convincing him to participate.