Linger begins its narrative with the story of a baby girl was once whisked away from her grandparents' home in an attempt to remove her from a drunken, abusive father, and to get her to safety. The baby girl is now a beautiful woman. Hester Collins and her mother combined their meager wages to keep a roof over their heads but now that Catherine Collins has passed, Hester is all alone. When her grandparents learn of Catherine's death, they write a letter and plead with their granddaughter to come live with them.

Hester finds a loving home with the elderly couple that she never really knew, on a farm at the end of a dirt road. She discovers a fascinating old man just up the road, at the Bishop farm, who has an immediate and emotional reaction to her return, and who shares his wit, his wisdom, and his poetry with her, despite the apparent displeasure of his suspicious, unamused son.

Hester also discovers her passion for growing things and for preserving the beauty of herbs and wildflowers with her art and her own gift for poetry. The elder Mister Bishop has declared the young woman, that his son has described as having dirty, bare feet and a profusion of long hair, flying in every direction, to be a wild wood nymph. The more disapproving his son becomes, the more humor his father finds in the effortless way the guileless, natural beauty manages to irritate him.

Despite his unwillingness, the day will come when the younger Mister Bishop must ask for help from Hester Collins. He will depend on her. He will need her. He will leave her.

His father once told him that life's pages only flip in one direction, and that he couldn't turn them back to read them again. Has he turned a page that he should have lingered on?