It is the fall of 1989. Tori Daniels and Brian Sage, both in their 30s, run a bookshop and café in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he also teaches in the English department at the College of William and Mary. Tori knows something that Brian doesn’t: a family secret revealed by his Aunt Lily in Dublin, Ireland -- only to her at the end of the first book (The Burden of Truth, Austin Macauley, NY, 2018) -- a deception so complete, it has remained hidden for decades as a carefully arranged truth, so coldly calculated and criminal, Tori is determined to unearth the whole story. She takes the opportunity of a business trip to Los Angeles to drive up the coast to Santa Barbara, and there, to investigate the accident in 1962 that tragically took the lives of two Sage family members. What Tori finds – yet another well-hidden deception -- will rip through the fabric of the family once it becomes known. Yet, if she seeks to “poke the sleeping bear,” the Sage family’s patriarch, how can she see him punished for what he has done without hurting other family members? As Tori begins her quest to rearrange the truth, she worries that pulling the threads she has worked loose could unravel all of the long buried secrets in the Sage family.