Sixteen months after the lights went out, nineteen-year-old Elmira Goodings has learned to live small. A hand pump on a shallow well. Nine rows of potatoes. A snare line on the ridge. And Jackson, eighteen years old, who loves her without hesitation and plans a future in twelve rows and a fixed barn roof.
Then a truck comes up the county road. There is no other sound like it left in the world.
What Hollander's crew does to Jackson in the Hendricks hayfield, Elmira watches through binoculars from a ridge four hundred yards away, unarmed and helpless. She buries him. She cuts off her hair with a kitchen knife. She sets down her own name like a coat she cannot afford to wear.
But the men who took everything from her have taken it from an entire valley, and revenge is only the beginning of what she owes it.