In the three years since the Virgil County High School Massacre, a story has grown up around one of the victims, Sarah McHale, that says she died proclaiming her Christian faith--but Leanne Bauer was there, and knows what happened, and she has a choice: stay silent and let people believe in Sarah's martyrdom, or tell the truth.

For the lucky among us, life is what you make of it, but for Dixie Wheeler, the theme music for her story was chosen by another long ago, on the day her father butchered her mother and brothers and then slashed a knife across his own throat. Only one-year-old Dixie was left alive, infamously known as Baby Blue for the song left playing in the aftermath of the slaughter. Twenty-five years later, Dixie is still desperate for a connection to the family...

The sole survivor of a brutal family massacre twenty years earlier, Kars McIntyre, when the person believed to be responsible for the killings is released, wonders how many times she can be the girl who survived as people around her die horrible deaths.

Ever since the mass shooting at her California high school, junior Morgan Grant has become increasingly agoraphobic until even the idea of stepping outside her door can bring on a panic attack, a situation not made any easier by the fact that her parents are divorced--but when Evan moves in next door she finds herself attracted to him and begins to find herself longing for the life she has been missing.