On Sunday, June 4, 2000, Reverend Sabre Winfrey preaches about worthiness and the seven seals from Revelation. His wife, Priscilla, watches from the pews, feeling both pride in his vocal talent and bitterness over their troubled marriage. Years earlier, church musician Melvistine Evan pushed Priscilla out of the sanctuary choir due to her limp. Though Priscilla once felt honored to type Sabre’s sermons, she now sees his ministry as centered on himself, especially after he hired an incompetent secretary named Linda for improper reasons. During the service, Priscilla notices their youngest son, Manny, exchanging glances with someone in the congregation—possibly the widow Kathareen, Diamond Bailey (daughter of Maggie), or Mary Kay’s oldest daughter. When her hip throbs, usher Bertha Benny discreetly passes Priscilla pain pills, which she takes while praying for God to protect Manny from predatory women.

The perspective shifts to 17-year-old Diamond Bailey, who sits in the third row to watch Manny, whom she calls Wonderboy. She reflects on his extraordinary talents: piano, drums, guitar, trumpet, and an otherworldly singing voice that moves audiences to tears. By the summer before sixth grade, his body transformed, voice deepening, muscles developing, and he became a football star who wore red cleats and dominated both sides of the ball. Their romance began 10 months ago, in their junior year, when he complained about her hair blocking his view in chemistry class. For two days running, he took her lunch tray as a courtship gesture; on catfish Friday, she refused, and he took another girl’s fish instead. That afternoon, he asked for her number. They are now together, and though he gives her money and she wants intimacy, they have mutually agreed to remain virgins. Diamond recalls a moment from Vacation Bible School when they were 13: a special education student asked if Jesus had a last name, and Manny replied that it was Winfrey. Mother Butler marched him to his father’s study; he returned smiling, saying his father approved.

On the previous Wednesday, Priscilla dusts her sons’ baby pictures, proud of their accomplishments: Trey and Moshe on full scholarship to Meharry, Mack driving trucks, Ivy studying music at Ole Miss, and Manny preparing for his senior year as salutatorian. She takes her bike out for a ride, feeling powerful and young. At Carpenter’s Junk Store, she chats with the clerk, Wilma, and entertains a passing fantasy about owner Craig Carpenter, who offers her a ride. She declines, knowing Sabre forbids her from being alone with men, especially white ones. Crossing the highway, she experiences a sudden, chilling urge to throw herself into traffic but resists. Arriving home, she discovers Manny’s truck parked in the alley. Upstairs, she hears labored breathing and pushes his bedroom door open to find him hunched over a naked Diamond on the floor. When Manny, masturbating over Diamond, turns and looks directly at her, Priscilla becomes convinced something is fundamentally wrong with him. She closes the door, retreats to her room, and takes pain pills with whiskey. Later, when Manny knocks, she ignores him, orders Italian takeout she cannot eat, and eventually tells him to go eat before withdrawing to bed.

Diamond experiences the same encounter from her perspective. Following Manny through his family’s large house, she feels out of place in its carefully kept rooms. In his bedroom, she undresses and lies on the floor while he kisses her briefly before standing to masturbate over her. Just as she idly wonders what the First Lady would think, Priscilla appears in the doorway. Mortified, Diamond believes she somehow summoned Priscilla with her thoughts. She scrambles to dress and follows Manny downstairs, crying and cursing at him for the first time. He drives her home, gives her money, and kisses her temple. Alone, she bathes and recalls attending a Finer Womanhood event years ago where Priscilla noticed her and her sister Cricket eating quickly. Cricket mocked Priscilla’s limp, and Priscilla walked away looking hurt, an expression Diamond now connects to the shock she just witnessed. She remembers her mother weeping at the Soap Opera Laundromat, lamenting that sometimes nothing goes right despite one’s efforts. Diamond worries her habit of counting letters in words to determine truthfulness means she is “crazy” like her mother.

Priscilla’s mind returns to Valentine’s Day 1976, when Sabre first coerced her into oral sex, using a demeaning biblical metaphor to justify it. Uncomfortable with the degrading act, she confided in her friend Bertha Benny, who advised feigning enthusiasm to speed it along. When Priscilla followed this advice, Sabre became suspicious and struck her, accusing her of learning the technique elsewhere. Now, witnessing Manny’s behavior, she links it to Sabre’s behavior and pities Diamond as a girl more humiliated by being caught than by the act itself. She recalls childhood attempts to heal her hip through prayer, various preachers laying hands while her mother whispered healing scriptures. She concludes that mothers must always ask and wait for relief, and she kneels to pray, believing this will fix everything.

On October 18, 1996, at a homecoming dance, an older teenage boy watches a seventh-grade girl and her friends perform sexualized dance moves. After dancing with her, he arranges to meet at the Red Panther River bank and leads her to the Canoe, a large replica of a Choctaw vessel.

Diamond spends the days after the incident in bed, grieving what she believes is the destruction of her relationship with Wonder, who is the one person she feels most connected to. Her mind drifts to childhood and the last home she shared with her mother and siblings: a motel room at the Sunflower Court Inn. She recalls the four of them—Yancey (14), Cricket (13), Diamond (eight), and Popeye (six)—together when Popeye’s father arrived with groceries but without Mama, announcing flatly that she had left. The children protested and demanded answers, but the man gathered his things and drove off without speaking to Popeye. His only parting instruction was to keep the perishables cold.

Emerging from the memory, Diamond feels unsettled. She refuses to call Wonder; beyond embarrassment, she suspects he knew what might happen. She draws a parallel to her absent mother, whom she sometimes blames for leaving them to manage on their own. She sleeps heavily and wakes to find Maggie home from a late shift, face-down on her bed. Diamond removes her shoes, covers her, and finds a note asking to be woken before her soap opera.

Priscilla, meanwhile, has been avoiding Manny but cannot ignore him playing a hymn at the piano with precision and control. She enters the parlor and reminisces about him and Trey performing the same song as small children, their voices electrifying the congregation. She takes over the keys herself and grows so emotional Manny has to help her to a chair. Her mind wanders through her difficult pregnancies and the daughter she always imagined but never had. When Manny attempts to discuss what happened, she deflects with music and weeping, feeling only relief when his truck pulls away.

By Saturday, Diamond sits on the porch watching neighborhood girls jump rope, wondering if she was ever that carefree. Senior year looms and she has no plan. Larger problems always took priority, and years of instability taught her that thinking about the future feels uncertain. Maggie joins her, offers to take her out during her vacation, and jokes about her own past athletic ability, drawing a rare laugh from Diamond. After Maggie leaves for work, Diamond reflects that her persistent sense of being an outsider is exactly why Wonder matters: Together they were creating something she felt part of.

Alone, she smokes marijuana in the backyard (a secret habit Wonder would condemn) and daydreams about a December wedding he has been asked to sing at, imagining herself there in a new dress. Her thoughts darken into a catalog of recent local tragedies the community calls the Reaping Season: fatal accidents, gang shootings that killed teenagers and a child, reckless driving deaths, and her friend Kimmie’s losing fight with leukemia. Frightened, she forces her mind back to the wedding fantasy before remembering she is supposed to be angry. She smokes again, aware the high does not address what she is feeling.

On Sunday evening, Wonder appears at her door. She plans to greet him coldly, but his presence softens her response, and she goes to him. They drive to a remote, flat stretch of road between crop fields for a driving lesson. He is patient and encouraging, and when she flinches at her own mistake with the gas pedal, he assures her he would never hurt her. He shares that his father used to slap his mother on occasion: Rev considered it a form of correction, though he looked down on men who beat women routinely. Wonder rejects even that, arguing that a man’s presence alone should be enough to command respect without violence. His words reinforce her sense of safety with him.

Priscilla, still trying to trace the origins of Manny’s behavior, focuses on a childhood memory. The family dachshund, Sam, repeatedly angered Rev until the day Rev stepped in the dog’s mess and beat the animal before chaining him outside. Later, Priscilla looked out the kitchen window to see Sam caught against the fence, legs cycling above the ground, with young Manny standing before him in shock. She freed the dog, but he died in moments. She held her sobbing son and then looked up to find Rev watching them from the study with cold malice. That night she moved her belongings into the guest bedroom, unable to understand his cruelty.

While cleaning, Priscilla fantasizes about Rev’s death: choosing a bright red burial suit, singing a solo in her fur stole, and eventually remarrying the widowed Dr. Booker, who recently made a suggestive remark to her. When Rev comes home complaining of stomach trouble, she needles him about another woman’s makeup on his shirt. He shuts her down with a biblical pronouncement that women were made for bearing children and men for authority. This idea stays with Priscilla, bringing to mind Manny standing over Diamond, and she connects his behavior to his father’s emphasis on control. Manny then appears in workout clothes, and Rev advises him against adding too much bulk, noting the quarterback position is evolving toward speed and agility. Father and son share a brief, affectionate moment: Rev still taller, but Manny already broader.

Diamond’s memories return to the motel and the aftermath of their mother’s disappearance. The older children strategized while Popeye slept: Yancey predicted Diamond and Popeye would be adopted for their appearance and age, Cricket’s family would reclaim her, but no one takes in a 14-year-old boy—he expected to age out of foster care alone. Yancey checked with their mother’s friend upstairs and returned bearing no news but carrying a bag of cheap candy someone had given him. Cricket divided the sweets into meticulous piles, rationing Popeye’s share on account of his bad teeth and scolding Diamond for always grabbing more than her portion. The four ventured out into the warm August night, searching two nearby bars without success, got caught in the rain, and huddled under the roof of an empty house before returning to the motel for a meal of processed meat, cheese, and packaged snack cakes. Cricket read aloud a magazine story about a plane crash survivor, prompting Popeye to declare he would never fly.

On September 8, 1998, a teenage boy notices a quiet, full-figured girl who plays first-chair saxophone in the school band. He finds her attractive with her prominent front teeth, deep reddish-brown complexion, and thick hair in ponytails and mentally labels her as one of the reserved types who are secretly wild. They meet at the library for an honors English assignment, and after it closes, he waits with her for a ride that never comes. She eventually accepts a lift, and he stops at a discount store before returning to the car, where he reclines her seat, remarks on the fine hair above her lip, and begins working through the layers of clothing she wears. When he presses his mouth against her skin hard enough to leave marks, her resistance collapses entirely.