Fifteen-year-old Elsa Byrd is on the verge of becoming a woman in the summer of 1935. It seems to her that, in a world run by men, coming of age is more of a curse than a blessing. Elsa feels powerless when her father enters the tuberculosis sanitarium and she's forced to live on her grandparents' farm. When she stumbles upon a stranger hiding in the barn, it's a welcome diversion as hiding him becomes an intoxicating secret. When a dead girl is discovered floating in a dory, it quickly shifts from the kind of secret Elsa wants to hug close, to the kind she doesn't dare let out. Her mentor, Lavinia Twigg, joins the police investigation and Elsa's caught between silence and disclosure, trust and doubt, risk and fear.