by Martha Dyer (Author)

Time slips its leash. After the pandemic, time walks differently with different people, allowing itself to languish in the rituals we missed. As time dozes and strolls, drowsy with one person and upright with another, people are forced to confront why they love their churches and baseball games, and what they're hiding from when they rest in their rituals.

For Deck, after COVID the return to the ballpark is a return home, to a place where life makes sense. His wife's unexpected pregnancy means change and expectation, maybe even failure; and he struggles to give up the escape of contentment in the face of self-doubt.

Margaret can go back to Mass, happy to pay the price of lost hours to be in an oasis of unchanging order. Her daughter worries that her mother is abandoning her living family to sit in a waiting room for death.

Gretchen's family has the opposite problem. Their mother would freeze them in place, afraid that time will take her family, and her purpose, from her.

As people wrestle with the idea of giving up what they love for who they love; two priests, whose parishioners are disappearing, take on the problem of time itself.