When a sex scandal breaks out at a New England boarding school, a videotape triggers the involvement of men, women, and teenagers, including the headmaster, a young boy who made a mistake, and his mother, while everybody looks for a person to blame.
Remembering the December afternoon twenty years earlier when her father and she found an abandoned infant in the snow, Nicky recalls her father's efforts to escape society after a tragedy and a young woman's struggles to live with her choices.
On an 1899 vacation in New Hampshire, fifteen-year-old Olympia Biddeford, innocent daughter of a prominent Boston couple, begins a torrid affair with a sophisticated married man nearly three times her age, leading to harsh consequences including her exile from the life she has always known.
Soon after she learns that the plane piloted by her husband, Jack, has exploded, Kathryn Lyons is drawn into a maelstrom of publicity fueled by rumors that Jack led a secret life . Kathryn sets out to learn who her husband was, whatever that knowledge might cost.
