Two years after Catharine's thirty-year marriage to physicist, Kenji Yamashiro, ends in his suspicious death, she is called to her childhood home to care for her aging mother. Catharine reluctantly gives up a prestigious career as a seminary professor and moves from Washington, DC, to teach at the small Midland Bible College in rural Pennsylvania, where she met her husband when he was a young immigrant from post-war Japan. Instead of being embraced by the past, it seems to push her away as she discovers a secret her husband never shared.
Catharine befriends a former classmate and now science teacher at the college who questions creationism, becomes embroiled in an evolution controversy, and faces dismissal. At the same time, she suspects someone from the ominous Physics Institute, where her husband was an eminent researcher, has followed her to Pennsylvania.
