Grace Lisa Vandenburg orders her world with numbers: how many bananas she buys, how many steps she takes to the cafe, where she chooses to sit, how many poppy seeds are in her daily piece of orange cake. Every morning she uses 100 strokes to brush her hair, 160 strokes to brush her teeth. She remembers the day she started to count, how she used numbers to organize her adolescence, her career, even the men she dated. But something went wrong.

Her father is dead and her mother is a mystery to her. Her sister wants to sympathize, but she really doesn't understand. Only Hilary, her favorite niece, connects with her. And Grace can only connect with Nikola Tesla, the turn of the twentieth century inventor whose portrait sits on her bedside table and who rescues her in her dreams. Then one day all the tables at her regular cafe' are full, and as she hesitates in the doorway a stranger-Seamus Joseph O'Reilly (19 letters in his name, just like Grace's)- invites her to sit with him.
And suddenly Grace may be about to lose count of the number of ways she can fall in love.