She never left the barbershop. He never stopped writing songs about it. Now he owns forty percent of the building - and twelve weeks to prove he came home to stay. Naima Whitfield has opened her father's shop on Ardmore Avenue at six fifty every morning since the day he died in the back room. Four chairs, four hundred photographs, forty-six years on one Baltimore corner. Now a developer holds six of the nine storefronts on her block, and a city hearing in September will decide whether Whitfield's exists on the map at all. Cassius Dupree left at nineteen with a Greyhound ticket and a demo, and built the career he was always going to build. He comes back to bury the uncle who raised him in chair two - and walks out of a lawyer's office owning forty percent of the only building he ever called home. They have history. Eight days of it, on a fire escape, eleven years ago. Then Cass finds a locked room behind the shop with carpet stapled to the walls, forty-one reel-to-reel tapes, and a microphone that has been waiting in a closet since 1986. What's on those tapes could save the block - or hand it away for a number with six zeros. And the only way to find out is to stand still long enough to be known. WHAT'S INSIDE - A dual-POV second-chance romance told in alternating chapters, his and hers - A Baltimore block drawn with love: a barbershop, a kitchen, a chess table, a church - A block party, a repast, a lemon pound cake used frankly as a bribe - Gentrification as real stakes, argued honestly on both sides - no cardboard villain - Forty-one tapes, one cedar chest, and a voice nobody has heard since 1987 - Warm, swoony, low-violence urban romance with a full happily-ever-after - Discussion questions and an author's note for book clubs
