Graduate student Jill Barnes is running out of time to produce a thesis while still struggling to come to terms with her mother's recent death. When a collection of papers belonging to a prominent 19th-century statesman become available for study, Barnes leaves her home and travels to Barnett County in middle Georgia to take advantage of the opportunity.The collection is everything she'd hoped, but Jill finds herself less and less able to concentrate on the task at hand. Grief over her mother's death is increasingly intruding into her thoughts and Barnett County is not the bucolic, rural community Jill assumed it would be. The county is divided and violence breaks out.In the midst of it all, Jill finds a Civil War diary among the statesman's papers that captures her life. In the diary she discovers a young woman's life and loss that mirrors her own. This first novel is about searching for answers to life's most basic questions and finding answers in the most unlikely places.