Seventeen-year-old Billy Benton finds Port Townsend on the Olympic Peninsula too small to contain the challenges he must face now that Karl Myers is in town, the father who Billy had been told had died in the Pacific Theater of WW II. The world becomes Benton's destination as he attempts to figure out his place in it, accompanied by a sixty-foot yawl and a beautiful and brilliant young woman who is desperate to escape an all too common reality in 1956. Myers faces a contrary challenge: realizing and accepting that his world has shrunk to the size of Port Townsend, and that it might not be large enough to accommodate his wife and son. Complicating Myers' challenge are a murder and kidnapping, the resolutions of which lead Myers to a clearer understanding of what lies ahead in his life