During a truce in the nationwide civil war, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Liberia asks The Reverend Abby Curlew, a sedate, middle-aged Episcopal rector and widow, to reopen an abandoned school and orphanage in Nimba County near the Ivory Coast border. Twenty-three years ago, this bishop knew Abby as Peace Corps teacher in a Nimba public high school when he headed the Catholic high school across town. He remembers her as agnostic, audacious and fiercely protective of children. Now that she is ordained, he believes she, with God’s help, can both manage a boarding school for orphans while smuggling about three hundred children, five at a time, across Liberia’s border into Ivory Coast. These children belong to highly placed officials in each of Liberia’s warring factions and are targets for reprisal. Their parents desperately trying to protect these children have placed them with the bishop who precariously hides them as orphans in Catholic homes throughout the county.

When Abby accepts this dual challenge of running a school and smuggling children, along with its great risks, she is unaware of the one factor that might have caused her to refuse. Her lover from her Peace Corps years, whom she presumes dead, has also returned to this small African nation as a mercenary. When she discovers that he yet lives, she hides herself from him for fear her physical attraction to him might distract her from her all-consuming duty to the children.

64,000 words