Approaching old age, Silas Harmon closes his San Francisco bookshop to retire to the summer cottage in Kentucky where he spent his youth. There he encounters -- for the first time in fifty-five years -- the lonely Polish refugee with whom he had a love affair when he was sixteen and she was thirty-two. Together they must now confront how that forbidden alliance influenced both their lives and how it will influence the few years ahead of them. --- Bruce Kellner has published books about writers Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, and Donald Windham, and on artists Ralph Barton and Charles Demuth. He compiled the first Harlem Renaissance encyclopedia and has written two memoirs, one about several remarkable women who influenced him, and the other one a cook book. He is a Millersville University Professor Emeritus of English and lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.