In the early 1950s— the decade before the Civil rights movement— racial boundaries kept people apart or brought them together in explosive and dramatic ways. Iris Courtney, a young white woman, begins a clandestine relationship with Jinx Fairchild, a Black man who defended her in a fatal street fight with a white man. That one act changes their lives overnight, altering their destinies in ways they could never have imagined in this emotion-packed novel of violence, love, and racism.