Against her will, Samantha, a 49-year-old librarian who has retreated for decades into the cloisters of celibacy as a woman betrayed, now finds herself pursued by, and obsessed with, unwelcome, wildly-inappropriate fantasies for a member of her church whose brash attitude and insolent comments arouse fear and revulsion-not her sort at all. Dan, a carpenter-contractor, finds her supercilious, frosty exterior a disguise inciting destructive and misogynistic fantasies. An irresistible impulse to conquer and abandon her leads to a calculated seduction and a violation. But the illicit and unlikely affair that happens against all reason-which each wants to conceal at all costs-lances the buried griefs that have poisoned the lives of both for so long. It is a brief but transformative pivotal event in this unforeseen tender affair of opposites.