Nine months after Catherine Leary’s father, a literature professor, passed away, she still has not fulfilled his final wish: that she scatter his ashes in the Seaboro River in South Carolina. The scene of a childhood tragedy that forced her family to move, Seaboro is the last place Catherine wants to see again. But on the evening of her thirtieth birthday, her father’s young colleague—whom she once dated—pays a visit.…

Forrest Anderson offers a challenge from Catherine’s father: three probing questions that he had planned to put inside a birthday letter to his daughter. But it’s the news that Forrest plans to memorialize her father in an article that includes the family’s time in Seaboro—and the surprising revelation that her father visited there in recent years—that sends Catherine reeling. Hoping to stop Forrest from exposing her family’s secrets, she agrees to accompany him to her once–beloved Lowcountry town—and embarks on a poignant trip into the past…a journey that might lead her into a new life of love, forgiveness, and self-discovery.…