Karen Godwell isn't as much ashamed of her mountain heritage as of what she once had to do to preserve it. She reinvents herself at college and doesn't look back till her clan's historic farm is threatened. Now, a curator at New York's Metropolitan Museum, she returns to the mountains only to come face to face with who she was and what she did. She must straddle the divide between the staunchly independent mountain culture she comes from and the sophisticated world she had become a part of, while wrestling her dangerously cunning brother for the farm. Cousin Bruce, the town historian, sees life through the family's colorful two-hundred-year past; a handsome local conservationist keeps one eye on the mountains and the other on Karen; her nine-year-old daughter is determined to succeed in the mission her dying father sent her on; and all the while, Karen tries to keep buried the ugly secret that drove her away.