Plantation owner John Edgefield and the enslaved woman he adored, Annalisa, bore a secret child in 1833: Abigail Edgefield. That hidden lineage sets the story’s tangled loyalties and long shadows in motion.
In the 21st century, Moca Tift discovers a portal in Rabun County, Georgia—an entry revealed to him by Morgan Pneuberry, one of his older clients. Morgan is an eccentric, retired mathematics professor from Morehouse College whose scholarship in Black history is matched by a deep familiarity with folklore and the occult.
Morgan’s grandmother, a family griot, preserves a dangerous tale: Abigail’s tutor, a man scorned by rejection, loved her so fiercely he would have her in life or in death. To answer that obsession, a priest of the dark arts enchanted Abigail’s headstone after her first death. According to the legend, anyone who sits on that headstone can slip through time—but only within the exact span of Abigail’s life: a 32-year, nine-day window. Arrive too early, and the era’s brutal realities make survival precarious for a Black man; arrive too late, and your future is swallowed by history, your fate folded into the record itself.
This is a story of lineage, ritual, and the perilous cost of crossing time for love—or for vengeance.