They Called Him Sunny

He has a nurse's nickname, a hospital bracelet, and three dollars he will not spend.

For a year, the man everyone calls Sunny has stood on a wall outside a coffee shop in St. Petersburg, Florida. He came out of the Gulf with eleven stitches in the back of his head and no name. He can hear a grinder set wrong from twelve feet away. He cannot tell you his mother's name.

Angie is forty-one, nine credits short of a degree, and can count on one hand the months she has covered rent and the car note together. She meant to walk past him. Instead, she folds three dollars into his hand and walks off without looking at his face. Then she keeps coming back. She searches federal databases on her bathroom floor at one in the morning, drives the county looking at walls, and learns what it costs to stand between him and the man she let into her own home.

Neither of them knows who Sunny was before the water: a husband, a father of two, and a Maryland man who hit an $850 million American Millions jackpot a year before one icy December night took everything money couldn't protect.

When his name finally comes back, it brings all of it with it. And the woman who went looking for him has to decide what she wants from a man who is only now beginning to grieve.

They Called Him Sunny is a novel about what it costs to be seen, what it costs to look away, and two people who find each other before either one is ready.