In the Winter of 2001, 29-year-0ld Walt Steadman survives a shooting in his favorite Boston Café that leaves four people dead. In the aftermath, Walt forms two new relationships: one with Ginger Newton, a privileged, reckless, Harvard undergraduate who is interviewing women about their lives for a book called Girls I Know, and the other with 11-year-old Mercedes Bittles, whose parents were killed in the restaurant. Wounded but resilient, all three must deal with loss and grief and the consequences that come when their lives change in unexpected ways.

Douglas Trevor is the author of the novel Girls I Know (Sixoneseven Books, 2013), and the short story collection The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space (University of Iowa Press, 2005). Thin Tear won the 2005 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award for First Fiction. His short fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, Black Warrior Review, New England Review, and about a dozen other literary magazines. He lives in Ann Arbor, where he is an associate professor of Renaissance literature and creative writing in the English Department at the University of Michigan.