Nine months after Catherine Leary s father, a literature professor, passed away, she still has not fulfilled his final wish: that she scatter his ashes in the Seaboro River in South Carolina. The scene of a childhood tragedy that forced her family to move, Seaboro is the last place Catherine wants to see again. But on the evening of her thirtieth birthday, her father s young colleague - whom she once dated pays a visit. . . . Forrest Anderson offers a challenge from Catherine s father: three probing questions that he had planned to put inside a birthday letter to his daughter. But it s the news that Forrest plans to memorialize her father in an article that includes the family s time in Seaboro and the surprising revelation that her father visited there in recent years that sends Catherine reeling. Hoping to stop Forrest from exposing her family s secrets, she agrees to accompany him to her once beloved Lowcountry town - and embarks on a poignant trip into the past . . . a journey that might lead her into a new life of love, forgiveness, and self-discovery. . . .