Julia's best friend Marney broke up her parents' marriage years ago. Now Marney shows up at her Manhattan apartment, asking the impossible - come home to Edisto Island to care for the half-sisters and half-brother she has never known. Marney, recently widowed, has lunch cancer. There's no other family to care for the children while she's in the hospital following surgery.
Julia loathes Marney. But if she doesn't step in, her own mother - who has never got over the divorce - will be called upon to take care of the children. So she heads to South Carolina to keep the peace.
On Edisto she begins to reconnect with the place and the people she's been running from her whole adult life. There's the local doctor who once stole a kiss from her on that very beach and the siblings she's never known - especially the sister with selected mutism named Etta who's the keeper of nearly every family secret... including the very one that just might bind up Julia?s long-since shattered heart.