Content Warning: This section of the novel includes descriptions of sexual assault, rape, and violence; it also depicts racism and lynching imagery.

A man with a cane and a slight limp stops at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Topeka, Kansas. He heads to the office of the pastor. He is not a member of the congregation, but Travis Boyette, a career criminal currently on parole and living in a halfway house near the church. Reverend Keith Schroder is uneasy meeting Boyette, who make the reason for his visit clear: “I gotta talk to somebody, and I got no place else to go” (11).

Boyette tells a stunned Schroeder that nine years earlier he abducted, raped, and killed a cheerleader in the East Texas town of Slone. He adds that an innocent man, once a star football player at the same high school, is set to be executed within the week for the crime: “They got the wrong guy” (13). Boyette now has an inoperable brain tumor. He wants to clear his conscience not so much out of guilt, but on the off chance that God may be real. Boyette, who still has a shred of humanity, is “disturbed by the fact that an innocent man is facing an execution” (16).