At seventeen, Lenora Hope / Hung her sister with a rope. Now reduced to a schoolyard chant, the Hope family murders shocked the Maine coast one bloody night in 1929. While most people assume seventeen-year-old Lenora was responsible, the police were never able to prove it. Other than her denial after the killings, she has never spoken publicly about that night, nor has she set foot outside Hope's End, the cliffside mansion where the massacre occurred....

Fleeing her abusive husband, Mila arrives in Butternut Lake and takes a job as a home health aide to a sullen patient who is haunted by the accident that nearly killed him.

Come hell or high water, Emmy Jo Massey will have a wedding. After three generations of Massey women with children out of wedlock, she wants the whole town of Hickory, Texas, to witness the legitimacy of her union with Logan Grady. But dream weddings arent cheap. So she accepts a highly lucrative stint as a home health assistant to retired realtor, and town recluse, Seth Thomasa decision her great-grandmother Tandy is dead-set against. Seth isnt happy...