Bonnie Marr has cooked Dunmere's harvest suppers for years. She knows who needs an extra portion, whose joints are too stiff to manage a casserole lid, and who will claim to have eaten rather than ask for help. This October, somebody else appears to be looking after them. Gutters are cleared overnight. Laundry folds itself. Stoneware bowls arrive on the doorstep with a little sheaf of wheat tied to each handle.

Then a neighbor's door is sewn shut. The village's scarecrows are facing the houses instead of the fields. And the woman who fed them the first supper has made a promise she no longer knows how to withdraw.

Cass Miller is fifty-two and worn thin, by severe fibromyalgia and by a lifetime of being told she is too much trouble in a world built for other people. Then she finds Seafoam, a stilt cottage on a hidden Mississippi canal, and everything eases. The pain quiets. The house seems to fit her, right down to her left-handed grip. A soft-spoken handyman named Beau begins to feel like home. For the first time in years, Cass feels truly cared for. She is only starting to wonder what that kind of care will cost her.