A daughter holds clues to her father's shocking secrets and her mother would risk anything to protect those secrets. Grace Truscott, in the biography of her father, a great civil rights advocate and senator, raises questions about a death. Was her own father guilty of killing Ned Emory, the husband of his African-American secretary?

Only one person, the secretary's daughter Nola, knows what really happened, but Nola is guarding a dark secret of her own. While Grace is struggling with a second marriage, melding his children and hers into a new family, the scandal breaks.