Talk of impending war is a steady drumbeat throughout North Carolina. Joetta McBride and her husband, Ennis, have built a modest but happy life for themselves, raising 15-year-old Henry and 11-year-old Robert on their small subsistence farm. They do not support the Confederacy’s position on slavery, but Joetta considers her family to be neutral. However, Joetta’s own father-in-law fills his grandsons’ heads with stories about the glory of battle and the Southern cause until one night Henry runs off to join the war. At Joetta’s frantic insistence, Ennis leaves to find their son and bring him home. But soon weeks pass with no word from father or son. Joetta finds herself increasingly at odds with those around her --- until one act of kindness brings her family to the edge of even greater disaster.

For Rae Lynn Cobb, a young woman disguised as a man, the Swallow Hill turpentine camp offers distance and anonymity from those who would wrongly imprison her for killing her husband. For charming bachelor Del Reese, it’s a place where backbreaking work might drown out memories of a recent trauma. The squalid camp is ruled by a sadistic boss named Crow and the greedy commissary owner Otis Riddle, a man who takes out his frustrations on his browbeaten wife, Cornelia. As Rae Lynn forges a deeper friendship with both Del and Cornelia, she begins to envision a path out of the camp. But she will have to come to terms with her past before she can open herself to a new life and seize the chance to begin again.