When Jenny Robinson's father dies of Huntington's disease, she tells her mother she will never marry out of fear that she might have inherited the disease. Jenny's mother, filled with grief over her husband's death and guilt over secrets she never told her daughter, dies from an overdose of prescription pills. She leaves an unfinished note along with a snapshot of Jenny's biological father, a man she met in England's Lake District-that secret alone neither Jenny nor anyone in her family could have guessed. Jenny is led irresistibly from Charlotte, North Carolina to Stoney Beck, a village in Northwest England.

In Stoney Beck, Jenny rents a cottage on the grounds of the Hare and Hounds Inn, the same cottage that her mother occupied when Jenny was conceived. On her first day, Jenny meets Biddy Biggerstaff who threatens to drive her away, saying that she knows who Jenny is, why she has come, and has even seen her photograph.

Unforeseen connections leading to mortal danger-and romance- await Jenny in the quiet village of Stoney Beck.