Where blood ties run deep and often intertwine, some secrets are too destructive to reveal. Divorced following the discovery of her husband's infidelity, Merris Alcott returns to her family's hereditary property to rebuild her life keenly aware of a sense of deja vu: when she was a child, her father similarly abandoned their family for another woman. Merris hopes the bitter shared experience will crack her uncommunicative mother's silence and help to forge a stronger bond between them. But home is not the haven she dreamed it would be. Her mother has suffered a minor stroke and is acting erratically, her beloved grandmother is ailing, and her younger sister is plagued by debilitating nightmares. Then, only hours after confiding some of the details of her father's desertion and begging Merris to locate him, Gran dies in an apparent accident. Charged by the stipulations of Gran's will to formally seek out her long-lost father, Merris soon finds that any number of people seem determined that Joe Alcott never return to claim the inheritance he walked away from thirty years before. As she begins pulling the family skeletons from her ancestral closet, warnings escalate to deadly threats until Merris realizes that her search for a truth few want to know has become the catalyst that threatens to destroy her entire family."