Catherine Clare reluctantly trades life in 1980s Manhattan for a remote home in the tiny hamlet of Chosen, New York, after her husband George lands a job teaching art history at a small Hudson Valley college. Even as she does her best to transform the old dairy farm into a place where young daughter Franny will be happy, Catherine increasingly finds herself isolated and alone. She soon comes to sense a sinister darkness lurking both in the walls of the ramshackle property—and in her marriage to George.

The lives of three women are unexpectedly changed when they cross paths at a New York Family Court.

Harvard educated lawyer Lucy Kelson, following in the footsteps of her lawyer parents, uses her career for social activism. She hides any sense of femininity behind her work. George Wade is the suave public face of the Manhattan-based Wade Corporation, a development firm that Lucy routinely opposes and whose true head is George's profit-oriented brother, Howard Wade. George, who has a reputation as a lady's man, has had as his legal counsel a series of beautiful female lawyers with questionable credentials, they who have more primarily acted as his casual sex partners. Needing a real lawyer, he offers Lucy the job of his legal counsel on a chance meeting. Despite warnings from her parents in working for the "enemy", Lucy, who has no intention of being the latest in his bed partners, accepts the job as she feels she can do more good from the inside, and as George, as part of the job offer, promises not to demolish a community center in a heritage building as part of a development ... Written by Huggo