For the last twenty years, slim, dazzling beautiful Verdi Mae has composed a quiet life for herself with her former professor, Rowe. He makes her feel so good, even as stifles her with his care--until, walking home from her cousin Kitt's, Verdi smells butter in the foggy evening air. It is the fragrance of the future beckoning. It is the scent of falling in love. It is also the harbinger of change. Verdi's first love has returned to town: Johnson, the boy from the back streets of Philadelphia who captured Verdi's heart when the two of them were in college. Their relationship was unalloyed sweetness until Johnson taught Verdi to love heroin.

With Johnson's reappearance, questions about the choices Verdi has made and the person she's become rise inexorably to the surface. As the ground beneath her shifts, Verdi must discover the one person who can save her--herself. In vivid, incandescent prose, Diane McKinney-Whetstone offers an unforgettable tour de force about love, betrayal, and faith.