Rachel comes home to Boothbay Harbor to find the bench, a site of childhood happiness and dreams, denied to her even as she struggles with the reality of her mother's illness. She lashes out at the tired, old soldier who has moved into Holmes Cottage and has fenced the bench from the people who visit and live in the Harbor. In no way can she foresee the paths of despair, guilt, hope, and love that will mingle when her angry visits to the cottage become a need to help and to find help.

"The town of Charleston lay across the river, on the north bank of the Kanawha, to the east of the bridge site and the Elk. It was not much of a town, at least not compared with Staunton or Winchester, but Charleston was a much newer town. He had never lived here; he had no reason even to be here until the war. Now he wished he had never seen the town, wished he could turn, ride away, and forget it was there. "

"He pulled up the short collar of his faded, gray uniform coat to cut off the wind that blew from the receding sun. He looked down the river. She and the children were in that direction. For over the thousandth night in this war he worried if they were safe, if they were afraid. He shivered against the March cold and wished he could be with them. Wished they could all hug into one great bed under a goose-feathered comforter. He wanted to lie with her, feel her warmth, forget the losses of the fighting, and remove forever from his memory the action he was about to take tomorrow. "

Captain John Corns leads his Special Forces team into the jungles of the Central Highlands of Vietnam in 1963. Th ere is an insurgency, and he and his Green Berets have undergone extensive training for the mission of assisting the Vietnamese and Montagnard people in their fi ght against communist terrorism. What they fi nd is a challenge that resists rapid progress and a cause that leaves destruction and death in its wake. Corns returns four years later as a major and operations offi cer for the Army/Navy Mobile Riverine Force in the Mekong Delta. Th e confl icting military forces are larger, losses to both the insurgent Viet Cong and to American Forces are greater, and the sacrifi ces of men around him beg the question of what will it cost to win and will it be worth the losses. Now a retired Lieutenant General, Corns looks back at those days as a young offi cer to share the worth, to him, of that experience-his time in Vietnam with men like himself.

In the summer of 1929, Carl and Helen Bradley bring their teenage children, Logan and Penny, to vacation at the Hotel Monterey in Highland County, Virginia. Despite the beauty of meandering streams and wandering flocks of sheep, the two young people fear there will be little of the excitement they have known in visits to the Atlantic beaches. They see no warning of the mystery-shrouded questions they will encounter or the danger they will face in the search that Jefferson "Topper" Fuller warns them not to begin.

For Penny and Logan, their parents, and Topper, honesty in the presence of danger to loved ones raises memories and distant losses they are reluctant to revisit. Can they accept the meaning of the past and act to change the present? Can they meet the challenges of the future, even aided by the warmth of new and rekindled love?

Thirteen-year-old John C. McCoy slips into the cold water of the Tug Fork River and swims through the darkness to the West Virginia shore and his future. It is 1909, and in a dozen years, he and his wife, Hiley, and two daughters struggle to survive, and the couple joins the fight for food, shelter, and safety in the coal fields. In 1979, shortly after John C. dies, his grandson, an Army colonel, seeks the story of the mine wars, denied to him in public education, and the role of his grandfather in those wars, a story denied to him by his family. He discovers violence, Matewan and Baldwin Felts detectives, Police Chief Sid Hatfield, the Battle of Blair Mountain, and a dark struggle of spies, distrust, and betrayal. And as the larger mystery for him unfolds, he fears the nature of his grandfather's actions in that war, doubts that he should be searching, and asks himself, what will he find, and to whom will he tell what he has found. What was his grandpa's role, and will it write a story of pride or shame?

"The town of Charleston lay across the river, on the north bank of the Kanawha, to the east of the bridge site and the Elk. It was not much of a town, at least not compared with Staunton or Winchester, but Charleston was a much newer town. He had never lived here; he had no reason even to be here until the war. Now he wished he had never seen the town, wished he could turn, ride away, and forget it was there. "

"He pulled up the short collar of his faded, gray uniform coat to cut off the wind that blew from the receding sun. He looked down the river. She and the children were in that direction. For over the thousandth night in this war he worried if they were safe, if they were afraid. He shivered against the March cold and wished he could be with them. Wished they could all hug into one great bed under a goose-feathered comforter. He wanted to lie with her, feel her warmth, forget the losses of the fighting, and remove forever from his memory the action he was about to take tomorrow. "

Rachel comes home to Boothbay Harbor to find the bench, a site of childhood happiness and dreams, denied to her even as she struggles with the reality of her mother's illness. She lashes out at the tired, old soldier who has moved into Holmes Cottage and has fenced the bench from the people who visit and live in the Harbor. In no way can she foresee the paths of despair, guilt, hope, and love that will mingle when her angry visits to the cottage become a need to help and to find help.