Ginny Beale is eighteen, irreverent, funny, and brave, with a brother she adores and a circle of friends for whom she would do anything. One night, while the town cheers on the high school football team, someone sets the school’s auditorium ablaze. Ginny’s best friend Gray Marsden’s father, a fire fighter, dies in the blaze. Ginny makes a shattering discovery that casts blame on the person she trusts most in the world. Ginny tells no one, and over the next two decades, she distances herself from the past and from nearly everyone in it. She marries a quiet man, raises their daughter, Avery, and cares for her tyrannical, ailing mother, Adela. But when Ginny’s husband, Harris, becomes embroiled in a scandal, Ginny’s carefully controlled life crumbles, and the secret she’s kept for twenty years emerges and threatens to destroy her hopes for the future.