He builds a machine that can look twenty-five years into the past, and the first thing he does with it is find the swing set behind his old primary school.

That's where she is. Twenty-three, heartbroken, painting badly on purpose because it hurts less than painting well. She has no idea that in a quarter of a century she'll draw a chalk circle around a silent, grieving seven-year-old and tell him he's safe inside it, an act so small she'll probably forget she did it. He never has. He's spent his whole adult life a little too alone, a little too careful, orbiting a debt he doesn't know how to repay to a woman he was told he'd never see again.

So Leo Marsh does the only thing that makes sense to a man who solves problems for a living: he goes back. Not to change anything. Just to sit with her a while, the way no one sat with him.

What he finds isn't a debt he can pay off. It's a person, funny, wounded, fighting her way back from a year of being told her instincts don't matter, who starts, slowly, to need him the way he once needed her. Except the more real it gets between them, the more the math turns against him. Every visit costs something. The window was never built to hold a person this long.

The Girl in the Chalk Circle is a love story that runs in two directions at once: toward a woman who saved a boy she'll never remember meeting, and toward a boy who might not survive proving some kindnesses come back around.