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....