Content Warning: The novel contains descriptions of emotional and domestic abuse, anti-LGBTQ+ bias, and references to suicide.

Emma Palmer, 16, arrives home at five o’clock in the morning to find her parents shot to death; her mother, Irene, is in the hallway and her father, Randolph, is slumped in his chair in the study. Her sisters, Daphne, 12, and Juliette, 18, are awake; Daphne’s clothes are bloody and Juliette is wearing someone else’s clothes. Afraid this will look incriminating, Emma tells her sisters to change clothes. She cleans up the crime scene, then calls the police to inform them of her parents’ death.

Fifteen years later, Emma is a freelance website designer and just learned she is pregnant. She is married to Nathan, deeply in debt, and estranged from Juliette and Daphne. When Nathan, who does not know about her parents’ murder, loses his job, he suggests that the only way for them to keep the pregnancy is to move into Emma’s empty childhood home in Arden Hills, Colorado. He suggests that they repair the house, convince Emma’s sisters to sell it, and buy their own house from the proceeds. Emma does not want to return to her old home, but goes along with Nathan because she wants to keep the pregnancy.