When, under staggering circumstances, Shelby becomes a single mother to four-year-old Shayla, her carefully managed world begins to fall apart. In a drastic attempt to escape her own violent childhood, Shelby moves to Germany, but quickly discovers how intimately linked memory and healing are --- and how honestly she must scrutinize her past in order to aspire to a richer future.

When Marshall Becker arrives in Lamorlaye, France, to begin the massive renovation of a Renaissance-era castle, he unearths a dark World War II history few in the village remember. The project that was meant to provide an escape for Becker instead becomes a gripping glimpse into the human drama that unfolded during the Nazi occupation and seems to live on in midnight disturbances and bizarre acts of vandalism.