In 1950s Clayton Valley, Ohio, star pupil Ellie dreams of going to nursing school and marrying Brick McGinty, a basketball star hoping to become the first person in his family to attend college. But when Ellie becomes pregnant, everything changes, and then a knock on the front door threatens to destroy their lives. Turning her hand to fiction, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Connie Schultz offers here a carefully observed historical novel that portrays how much people know—and pretend not to know—about the secrets at the heart of a town.