A year, a number, a piece of time,

A distance in living, a state of mind,

Begins as a woman awaiting her lover . . .

It was and would always remain impossible to say how it all happened.

Torn apart by a recent divorce, guitar-strumming everyman Jonathan Chase abandons his life in Denver to return to Saginaw, Michigan, and start anew in his place of birth. But much more than childhood memories await.

While managing a used bookstore, he discovers an old family album, bound in dark leather and brittle and faded. It is filled with sepia-toned images, the names of each person penciled in cursive underneath.

Although not the usual inventory he stocks on the shelves, Jonathan can't seem to part with it. The heavy paper, hairstyles, and clothing speak of an earlier era, yet the portraits and their provenance are mute on the page. All once vital, thinking, loving, hating, hoping, dreaming - living - beings, there is now little more than slabs of fading paper to testify to their lives. It saddens him to think what an awesome and terrible power time reveals itself to be.

Until he turns the page and sees her for the first time.

In the gloaming of a snowy December night, Jonathan falls asleep with the album and his cat Pluto by his side . . . and awakens to the chime of a bell, distant but clear, in 1864 and the middle of the Civil War.

Although his journey of romance, war, intrigue, mystery, and a touch of the supernatural will lengthen and deepen far beyond what he ever would have imagined or even thought possible, the why was the easiest question of all.

Apollonia was the why.