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"Roddick with an R. You can check the spelling on the Tony."

Elizabeth Roddick has two Tony nominations, one win, and forty years of walking into rooms that turned to look at her. At fifty-eight, she can still crack a line nobody else in New York can crack. So, when the producers call her back after the audition of her life, she knows exactly what they are going to say. She is wrong. They want her for the grandmother.

Her oldest friend Esme, who looks impossibly rested at fifty-four, offers to introduce her to The Aubade: a Hudson Valley retreat in a former tuberculosis sanatorium, nine guests at a time, no website, phones locked in a brass cabinet by the door. On her ninth night, Elizabeth jokes that she would do anything to be young again. The owner, Helen Walker, finds her in the rose garden and asks whether she meant it. By morning there are four stapled pages on the table, a twelve-thousand-dollar pen that draws blood, and an offer: twenty-three again, in a single night.

Everything is disclosed. Nobody pressures her. Helen even leaves the room so she can read. Elizabeth has signed a thousand contracts without reading them, and nothing has ever gone wrong.

Yet.