Abigail Cutter Livres

Haunted by his past, Tom Smiley grapples with guilt over his involvement in the Confederate defense of slavery while lingering in his abandoned Virginia home. The arrival of a young couple in the twenty-first century disrupts his solitude, prompting Tom to confront his dark secrets and his family's complex wartime legacy. He unexpectedly bonds with Phoebe Hunter, the new owner, as her discoveries challenge their perceptions of history and personal redemption, leading to significant revelations for both.

Tom Smiley is a Confederate soldier whose regret for ill-chosen allegiance haunts him not just from enlistment through the horrors of a Union prison but all the way into the afterlife, where he lingers in his ancestral home, unable to shed his shame over fighting to protect slavery--until, one summer afternoon in the early 2000s, two intruders barge into his Virginia house and force him to confront his past.