Set in the late seventies, Egan Drummond, a thirty-six-year-old, twice-divorced history teacher, takes a job at a boarding school on the northeastern coast of Maine to escape the modern myth of the sustainability of a society built on out-of-control consumption. In this remote location, he finds himself positioned to pursue a long-cherished dream: with everyone gone for the Christmas holiday, he can work on a research project he'd been planning for some time. But the peace he expects to find in the old building he's living in ends when he discovers another teacher, Margaret Gillespie, still there with her small daughter Sonya. Convinced there's someone else in the building, Margaret turns to the only person she can confide in-Egan. Through her he finds himself not only caught up in the events of her life, but also on a journey back from the edge of loneliness to an unexpected second chance as a man. And he discovers something else-solid evidence that the first attempt of the Native Americans to drive the whites out of the New World did not happen the way it's been portrayed. It is the chance of a lifetime, an opportunity every historian dreams of. But in putting the pieces together, the picture that emerges is not the one he expected, and he discovers that the forces at work then are still at work, leaving him with the choice of guarding what he's learned, or making himself famous at the cost of everything he's come to cherish.