Written with deep emotional resonance, Anita Shreve unfolds a tender and surprising novel about love and its consequences, after a widower and his daughter make a discovery that changes their lives forever.

What makes a family? That's what twelve-year-old Nicky Dillon wonders after she and her widowed father discover a wailing abandoned baby in the snow-filled woods near their New Hampshire home.

Through the days that follow, the Dillons and an unexpected visitor who soon turns up at their door—a young woman evidently haunted by her own terrible choices—face a thicket of decisions, each seeming to carry equal possibilities of heartbreak and redemption.