A sheltered, only child, raised on a farm in the small, southern town of Wilkeston, fifteen-year-old Jessica has limited experience of boys. She is feeding kittens in the farm hayloft when the pastor's seventeen-year-old son, her high school heartthrob, enters. Shivering with excitement, she invites him to help her, then succumbs to emotions she doesn’t understand and tempts him to kiss her. In her innocence she lets things go too far, and only when Colby becomes forceful does she resist. But by then it is too late.
Jessica’s guilt is so wrenching that she can't talk about what happened, even to her parents. She later discovers she is pregnant and, with time and reflection, her guilt turns to anger. But because her parents and the Church of the Epistles want her to marry the unnamed father of her baby—which she will not consider —she still cannot talk to anyone. Her silence is taken as lack of repentance, and she is cast out of church and home.
Jessica is not alone in her despair. Middle-aged Dwight Cook is struggling with the economic failure of his hardware store, with estrangement from his wife and oldest son, and with uncontrollable lust for a female employee half his age. And when a teen-age boy’s homosexuality becomes public knowledge, his parents and his fellow high school students are horrified.
The judgment visited on the protagonists is terrifying and their guilts and isolations heartbreaking. When prejudice leads to murder and the FBI comes to town, the stakes increase, and even the pastor is thrown into the despair of doubt.